The Water's Edge

by Daniel Judson

  “It could be. It certainly looks that way.”

  “That’s the problem, though.”

  “What?”

  “Everything looks exactly the way it should. It looks like Castello is behind four murders, but according to you he’s not. It looks like Roffman is up to something, a lot of people are eager to think he is up to something, but in my experience things are seldom how they look. Anyway, I’d need more than him knocking on a door and then walking away to think that he’s behind four murders.”

  “If not Roffman or Castello,” Bechet said, “then who?”

  “I don’t know. But I’d like to hear what Roffman has to say for himself.”

  “He’ll talk to you?”

  “I think so. Anyway, we have footage of him coming to the apartment of a woman who was involved with someone who had worked for Castello and is now dead. A woman who has taken off with something stolen from Castello. He’ll either talk to me now or to the feds tomorrow.”

  “You can play hardball like that?”

  Miller nodded. “Yeah.”

  “I’d like to hear what he has to say,” Bechet said. “But he shouldn’t see us together.”

  “I can record the conversation.”

  “I’d rather hear it live. No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  “I have gear for that.”

  “So do I,” Miller said.

  “I’d rather use mine, if it’s okay.”

  “Yeah, no problem.”

  “Can you set up a meeting for this morning?”

  “Probably.”

  “I’d like to see the video of him coming to Abby’s door. Like you said, hearing is one thing, seeing for yourself is something else.”

  “I can get you a copy.”

  “Appreciate it,” Bechet said. “I’ll give you a ride to your place, park down the street. You can run up and get it for me, okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wait here.” Bechet picked up his pack, started toward the office door.

  “Hold on,” Miller said. “I have a few questions.”

  Bechet stopped, turned, looked at him. “What?”

  “My friend thinks you might be working for Castello again. Are you?”

  “No.”

  “How do I know that?”

  “You don’t. But you can ask Eddie. Anyway, I don’t do that kind of work anymore.”

  “You used to, though?”

  Bechet nodded once.

  “And you have nothing to do with him now?”

  “No.”

  “So then why are you doing this? Why are you getting involved?”

  “Let’s just say we both have someone we want to protect.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Castello went to a lot of trouble recently to make it so I had no choice but to do what he wanted.”

  “What is it he wanted you to do?”

  “Find the traitor in his family. And get back what was stolen from him. He seemed to be under the impression that finding Abby might help me do both.”

  Miller thought about that. “How’d he give you no choice?”

  “He threatened to hurt everyone I know, everyone in my life, including Eddie and his wife.”

  Again, Miller said nothing, thinking.

  “Castello has more than just Roffman in his pocket,” Bechet said. “He has other cops, too, each one there to keep the others on their toes. To keep the others honest. It looks to me like one of those cops is making a move. It might even be all of them, working together.”

  “Do you know who these other cops are?”

  “No. But it’s someone who knows enough about Roffman’s connection with Castello to play them against each other. Probably someone with something to gain by either of them falling on his face. Or both of them.”

  “That could also be anyone in Castello’s organization. Why do you think it’s a cop?”

  “There’s something in the way the investigation is being handled.”

  Miller thought about what Mancini had told him, about the quickness with which Adamson had been killed, how only a cop could have known Adamson had witnessed Michaels and Romano being hanged off the bridge. Miller thought, too, of something else.

  “The problem with that is it just brings us back to Roffman,” he said.

  “So maybe it is him after all. Or him and someone else, another cop or someone in Castello’s family. Either way, I’d like to hear what the man has to say You’re positive you can ask tough questions?”

  “There’s no love lost between Roffman and me.”

  “If that’s the case, then it’s possible that’s why you got dragged into this in the first place.”

  Miller nodded. “Maybe.”

  “We should get moving,” Bechet said.

  Miller didn’t move. “I need to know something first.”

  Bechet waited.

  “If you aren’t helping Castello, then why are you looking for the traitor in his family?”

  “If someone is looking to start a war between Roffman and Castello, I want to make sure I’m on the right side.”

  “And which side is that?”

  “Whichever side is trying to smash Castello and his family to pieces. Hearing what Roffman has to say just might give me an idea which side that is.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then I do whatever I can to help them. I don’t care about what was stolen, or who the traitor is. All I care about is that no one gets hurt. No one who doesn’t deserve it, anyway. Not Eddie, not Abby, not anyone. You can understand that, right?”

  Miller nodded. “Yeah.”

  “My storage unit isn’t far from where you live. I’ll drop you off, you bring down the tape, then I’ll get my gear and meet you somewhere safe.”

  “I’ll call Roffman, set something up.”

  “Just tell me where, I’ll be there before you.”

  “How will I get in touch with you?”

  “When you come down with the tape, I’ll give you a number.” Bechet waited a moment, sized Miller up one more time, said finally, “I hope Eddie’s right about you, that I can trust you.”

  “I’m hoping he was right about you, too,” Miller said.

  Bechet stepped into the office. Miller stayed where he was, could hear Bechet talking to Scarcella and his son. It was obvious that they had heard everything that had been said, despite the closed door. Bechet asked when the sedan was going to be ready, Scarcella told him it would be done by the afternoon. Miller assumed they were discussing the sedan in the next bay. Bechet was in the process, then, of changing vehicles again. A smart move, but Bechet was a smart man, not at all what Miller had expected.

  Bechet told Scarcella that he was going leave his shoulder pack with them, and that he’d be back in a couple of hours. Scarcella instructed his son to unlock the gate for them. When Bechet returned to the bay, he was sliding a single cell phone into the pocket of his jeans and the younger Scarcella was behind him. The guy could have been, Miller thought, Bechet’s shadow.

  Together they stepped through the heavy steel door and out into the morning rain. Bechet and Miller headed for the green Jeep, Scarcella toward the gate. He reached the gate and unlocked it, sliding it back on its rollers. He waited there as Bechet steered his Jeep through. In the passenger seat, Miller glanced at Scarcella as they passed him. They made eye contact, Scarcella nodding once. It was, strangely, an almost gallant gesture, easily as friendly a gesture as Miller had seen the guy make so far. Miller looked behind as the Jeep pulled onto the back road and drove away. He saw Scarcella tugging the gate closed, wondered then what it would be like to live and work in a place such as that—isolated, fenced-in to the point of being as secure as a fortress, various ways of escape right there for his choosing.

  Bechet said, “You live at the end of Elm Street, right? By the train station?”

  Miller nodded. There was no point in asking how Bechet knew this. What they knew of each other, and
how exactly they had come to know it, that was all irrelevant now, had to be, maybe would always be, maybe should always be. The past was, after all, the past. Wasn’t it? Miller, these two years spent alone in his apartment, living his cold neutrality, had counted on that being the case, had built his limited existence around the very belief that a man could stop, strip his life bare, start over again from scratch. His years as a PI, and the years before that—terrible years when he was a young man running wild, morally bankrupt and causing harm, poisoned by a notion of privilege and indestructibility—those years amounted to different lives, each one a separate life unto itself, the first life having nothing at all to do with the second life except for the fact that it had made that second life necessary. This, then, now, was the life that had to count; a third chance was more than one could ask for because most didn’t even get a second. So the past had to be past, that was all there was to it, for himself, for anyone who even looked like he was trying to begin again, or make good, anyone trying to resist what he was for that which he could be, if only fate would let him. And anyway, of the things that Bechet knew or might know, all that mattered to Miller was what would help him locate Abby. Nothing more, nothing less. He’d make whatever deal he needed to make with any variety of devils to get that, to get to her.

  As if reading Miller’s mind, Bechet said, “You know, she could be long gone already.”

  He glanced in the rearview mirror as he followed the curving back road through the woods, heading toward Noyac Road. There was kindness in Bechet’s voice, Miller thought. A real thoughtfulness, concern. This all caught Miller just a little off guard. A man with Bechet’s appearance—savage, somehow, and cunning, like some animal—wasn’t supposed to sound like this.

  “She could have taken off with whatever’s in that suitcase of hers,” Bechet continued. “Or if she’s working with someone, she could have run to him. I could see her doing either of those things. I’m just saying, we might not find her. Ever.”

  Again, Miller nodded. “If she’s long gone, then she’s safe. If she’s with the man she wants to be with and he protects her, then good for her, this is none of my business. But if not, if she’s alone and scared somewhere, I don’t want to leave her like that.”

  That was the previous Miller, the younger Miller, not the Miller—the man, bearded, almost thirty, retired, finally smarter—that he was now.

  Bechet checked the rearview mirror again, then looked ahead. The off-road tires of his Jeep hissed on the wet pavement, water spattering against the undercarriage like shrapnel from an explosion whenever the vehicle crossed a part of the road that had been washed over by more than an inch of rainwater. The ride was bumpy, ridiculously so, but that was a Jeep, Miller thought—its stiff leaf-spring suspension was meant more for trails and dunes than curving back roads or, for that matter even, highways. Bechet held the wheels with both hands, steered with small, nearly constant gestures. A Jeep was, at best, a top-heavy and overly responsive vehicle, made that way by its high center of gravity and narrow wheelbase. A single bold stroke by the driver at the wrong moment could easily send the thing wildly out of control. Bechet seemed to Miller, though, to be a cautious driver. But then again, why wouldn’t he be? Everything about the man, everything he did and said, seemed to be informed by that particular need, and that need alone.

  They were maybe a mile from Noyac Road, fifteen minutes, give or take, from Southampton, when Bechet spoke again. It seemed to Miller that Bechet had needed a moment to decide whether or not to say what he was now about to say.

  “You know, back when she was working for me, there probably wasn’t a day when she didn’t talk about you.”

  Miller heard that, didn’t know what to make of it. Finally he looked over at Bechet.

  Bechet thought for a moment more before deciding to continue.

  “There wasn’t a day when she didn’t talk about whether she should call you or not,” he said. “There wasn’t a day when she didn’t wonder whether or not she should show up at your place and wait for you to get home from work. She’d go back and forth a dozen times in one day—hate you, love you, glad it was over, miss you. Every morning when she arrived for work I’d ask her, ‘Well?’ Meaning, ‘Did you cave, go to his place?’ I expected her to at least once say, ‘Yeah.’ But she’d just shake her head.” Looking at the road ahead, Bechet shrugged. It was more a gesture of decisiveness than indifference. “As far as I could tell, leaving you wasn’t an easy thing for her to do. She just couldn’t stand her nights alone. It was as simple as that. And staying away from you was . . . a struggle, clearly. Just thought you might want to know that.”

  Miller looked out the passenger door window, said nothing. He thought about what he had just heard. The summer Abby had worked for Bechet was the summer Miller was finally coming to the realization that being a PI wasn’t for him, that maybe Abby had been right when she’d told him that redemption was to be found elsewhere, if it was to be found at all. Her last words to him, more or less, before packing her grandfather’s suitcase and walking to the station to wait for the evening train. There were nights that summer—a season with a half dozen weeklong heat waves, some seemingly right after another, and a string of jobs that only confirmed the worst that people could do to each other—that Miller would find himself hoping against hope that he’d come home to find Abby waiting for him in his bed. Their bed, once. How he had craved that, like nothing else. The shape of her beside him in a room so dark that the only shapes one could know were those that could be felt. It was odd now for him to know that there had actually been a chance of his getting what he had wanted, what he had hoped for knowing there was no hope of it, that he might have come home one night to discover her presence in their empty bed, hear her words in the silent darkness, feel her breath upon his face. . . .

  Miller closed his eyes now; doing so allowed him to put himself there, with Abby and what could have been, if only. There wasn’t, after all, much else for him to do, nothing for him to see except the bleak, mizzling morning rain and the bare trees moving past his window. He was done talking for now, done listening to this man beside him, and to the questions in his head, done considering the pieces that added up, or at least looked like they did, and the pieces that didn’t.

  Miller kept his eyes closed for a long moment, lingering in thoughts that weren’t really thoughts, memories that weren’t really memories. Such a vivid night, for one that had never been. When he finally reopened his eyes, Miller saw that Bechet was looking in his rearview mirror. He appeared to Miller to be puzzled by what he was seeing now behind them. Deeply puzzled.

  “Where the hell did he come from?” Bechet muttered.

  Miller glanced at Bechet, then turned and looked through the rain-smeared back window. What he saw made as little sense to him as it had to Bechet.

  A vehicle was right on their tail.

  But not just any vehicle, Miller realized. A Volvo sedan. Barton’s Volvo. On their tail and closing fast.

  “Hang on,” Bechet said, but it was already too late, the front bumper of the Volvo had slammed into the Jeep, not dead center but to one side, the passenger side, as if the driver of the Volvo were trying to nudge the Jeep into a spin. Not that it would take a nudge even, a single panicked pull on the wheel by the driver would, at this speed, on a road this slick, be more than enough to set disaster into motion. Bechet didn’t panic, though, held the wheel firm, straining to keep the Jeep from veering off the back road. Miller looked at the driver of the Volvo, didn’t see a face, only segments of one showing through the eye and nose and mouth slits of a dark ski mask. Miller’s mind, as if it had just been stirred from a complex and pleasant dream, struggled to make sense of this strange reality. What the hell was going on? What did Barton think she was doing?

  But a second nudge by the Volvo, harder than the previous one, jolting Miller like a shove, made her intentions clear. The Jeep skidded forward, then shuddered wildly as Bechet downshifted and hit the accelerato
r, the engine screaming beneath the hood. The Jeep lurched forward again, this time under its own volition, putting distance between it and the Volvo. The distance, though, didn’t last; the Volvo’s engine screamed as well and it came after the back quarter of the Jeep a third time, ramming it with its steel-reinforced nose. The Jeep was shoved forward once more, but this time, since it was in a low gear and in the process of accelerating, the extra force was just too much. Miller felt another shudder, a different one this time, the shudder that comes with the loss, regaining, and loss yet again of traction. He saw Bechet laboring to keep control, doing all the right things, but there was at this point nothing that could be done. The Jeep began to spin, and even in the best of conditions—dry roads, no Swedish-engineered car ramming him from behind, a skilled driver behind the wheel determined to take him out—there would have been little that Bechet could have done. Jeeps were simply not built for maneuvers such as these.

  Miller reached for the handle mounted above the glove compartment, clung to it as the Jeep slid passenger’s side first down the road. Bechet tried to steer his way out of that, and then, suddenly, the Jeep was sliding driver’s side first. It went back and forth like that for what felt like forever, fishtailing, sideways and facing one direction one second, then sideways and facing the other direction the next, the Jeep’s light rear end always prying its nose away from wherever it was aimed. At last, when the front tire, angled sharply, caught something resembling traction by straying from the paved road and sinking into the muddy shoulder, Bechet made a last-ditch attempt at regaining control by turning the wheel with everything he had, trying to guide the Jeep into the soft mud. His large shoulders flexed, and his knuckles, white from grabbing the wheel, looked to Miller’s eye like a tiny range of snow-capped mountains. The instant Bechet spun the wheel Miller heard a dull clunk from the front end, knew right then that a tire rod had snapped under the strain. Despite which direction Bechet turned the wheel now, the Jeep would remain in its current sideways slide. Miller braced himself as they rode that slide, waited for the Jeep’s top-heavy design to succumb to physics and unleash the roll that was inevitable.