by Jamie Mason
“No-ooo. If you work with someone, you just say work with. Why is this do business instead? That’s like trying to say something without saying it. Why is it different?”
“You’re making a big deal out of nothing, Carly.”
“Why did you say you were going to play racquetball?”
“I didn’t know how long I’d be gone.”
She was quiet long enough that he thought she might be done. He’d run her fresh out of moves with a nonsensical answer. It was a good strategy.
But a slight psychic whir of gears still moved the air between them.
“Is a game of racquetball longer or shorter than forever?”
Jonathan let a sigh stand in for trying to outdo her, dodge for thrust. But her comment tingled at the base of his skull.
He resisted drumming his fingers on the steering wheel as the plan of what to do took on its edges. She was right. It was time to go. He slowed the car and dragged the wheel over into a hard U-turn.
“I’ve changed my mind. Text your mom. Tell her we’re coming to pick her up. It’s been a long day. I don’t feel like going to the store. I’m thinking Don Julio’s for dinner.”
“Shouldn’t she just meet us? We’re almost there anyway.” Carly stretched into the back seat behind him for her phone.
“No. Let’s just all go together. It won’t take long.”
She flopped back into her seat, scooching deep into a slouch, thumbs tapping out the message.
She couldn’t keep it up forever. She was a kid, not a practice partner for his mental chess. He slid a sideways look at her and nodded at the phone in her hand. “And I’m going to want to see exactly what you said to Ada to drag her into this. Your friend is not going to thank you for getting her into trouble, too.”
But when their eyes met, a little jolt rocked Jonathan’s heart in its nook. She wasn’t gassed out for the sparring. Not by a long shot. She was glowing and more than happy to blow up his bluff.
“You want to talk more about why I wondered where you were? Really?”
She wasn’t off guard. He was. A riptide of embarrassment pulled at him. Jonathan fixed his stare on the road ahead and locked his posture against reconciliation. “No. I want you to text your mother like I asked you to.”
Carly went back to her typing.
His face went warm and the heat sank all the way through him, prickling under his shirt collar. “This smart-ass phase isn’t going to go well for you.”
Carly shifted at the edge of his vision, looking at him for a few weighted seconds, then turned her face to the window.
His thoughts shifted to the trunk.
Owen had nudged Jonathan with the little wisecrack about having a packed bag and passport in the car. As it so happened, he did. The meeting with Owen, Jonathan knew, was either a beginning or an end. Depending on how things went, he knew it might’ve even meant leaving straightaway from the restaurant.
Going for the Anningers had been both risky and also the only thing he could think of. Selling the painting for pocket change to someone who didn’t know what it was, and what it was worth, was pointless after all he’d done, after all he’d been through.
If he’d known about the Flinck at the outset, he would probably have settled for a slice of the FBI reward and a pat on the back. And he’d have an entirely different life now.
But here he was. Here they all were.
So Donna and Carly didn’t know it, but he’d said his goodbyes back at the house, paying attention to everything that had been part of this brief new life. He’d looked carefully, loading the house, the light, their faces, into his mind for use in memory. Just in case.
He was glad he had.
Right before Carly had intervened in the conversation with Owen, Jonathan had caught a whiff. When he’d gone too far, he could actually smell it. Several times in his life everything had depended on it—with a psychotic bully he’d once taunted in school, with his dad’s drug dealer on a bad day, at Roy’s first pistol shot in the alley that night.
There at the end of the confrontation in the restaurant, there’d been a change in Owen’s demeanor. Jonathan hadn’t noticed it outright, but something signaled to him in a faint smell coming off his own skin like fresh raw meat and warm metal. Somehow his body knew the danger, warned his survival instinct when his mind had run ahead of it, reckless and unheeding.
Real or imagined, he took the omen to heart. Sitting there in the booth across from a man he was now convinced would kill him when the timing was good, Jonathan was glad of the suitcase in the car.
Except for he had lied about the painting. He’d claimed it wasn’t in his house. But it was.
He’d tried to move it for safekeeping, but every place he’d tried to leave it had made it impossible for him to function. Having it in the trunk of his car made him sweat every lane change and intersection. Millions of dollars could be reduced to splinters—and ones that could still land him in prison—in a single fender bender.
He’d rented a small storage unit and tried putting it there. That lasted nine hours.
The house was the only safe place he could watch at all times. With Interior 1 trained on the foyer, John was a bird on a full nest. He could tap it up on his phone whenever he needed to double-check it, to calm himself when the worry rose like mercury in a thermometer.
So he’d zipped the painting into the garment bag that held his worn-twice tuxedo and hung it in the foyer closet, in view of the camera, and he found a way to be okay with it. But he hadn’t considered that Owen would show up there.
But he had.
Until Jonathan could talk to Roy and deal—or not—with Owen and the Anningers, he wanted the painting, and himself, gone. It didn’t matter where, just anyplace Owen couldn’t find him.
Dinner at Don Julio’s would end in a fight with Donna. John would see to that. Carly had hand-delivered the kindling for the argument. It would be easy. He’d leave them, pick up the painting, and get triple-digit miles away before the moon came up.
• • •
Carly switched from the front to the back seat for the ride to dinner. John kept the conversation light and conspicuously not about the last hour. He felt Carly watching him and caught her studying eyes in the rearview mirror.
They settled into a table by a stuccoed wall hung with sombreros and a driftwood-framed Aztec print.
Donna ordered margaritas. Jonathan prepped the stage for the blowup. He hadn’t looked at or spoken to Carly since they were all together. By now Donna would have noted it, even if not consciously. He felt Carly scorching him with scrutiny from across the table.
The drinks came. He cleared his throat. “So. Carly. Do you want to tell your mother what happened today or should I?”
He felt like a slow learner. He expected her to go red to the ears. He thought she’d give way in front of her mother and he’d deliver a quick, righteously offended attack. Donna would take her side. He would leave. Then whatever happened would be the next thing in his life. He might come back. He might not.
But what he got instead, when he finally acknowledged her, was a Carly who leaned in, nearly sprawling on the tabletop, lowering her chin to rest on her loosely crossed arms. She was interested to the point of amazement. “Nah. I’m good. It’s all you, John-zee.”
Donna looked between them, caught between alarm and amusement. “What’s going on? What happened?”
Rage made syrup of his blood, slow and achingly heavy, and for an ugly instant that hot lethargy dragged against the idea of slapping Carly. He didn’t need this shit.
He took a quarter of his margarita in a single, cold pull.
“You know what? I’m going to hit the restroom first.” Jonathan took another sip, set his glass on the table with a restrained bang, and pushed back his chair. It scraped across the tile with a stuttery yowl.
Donna called after him, “John!”
His phone buzzed a double notification into his pocket just as he hit the door ma
rked GUAPOS. He thought Donna might be checking in with him, short quick notes of allegiance or what the hell. She wasn’t used to seeing him angry. It had never been useful to have her worried about that. So he had always made angry look like anything but. He let it smolder under the banner of being tired or busy or everything’s fine. He never raked his chair across the floor and stomped off with a mouthful of margarita.
But the text read: Alert: Exterior_1 Driveway
Alert: Exterior_2 Front Door
Another came in as he tapped the app open to see the images.
Alert: Exterior_3 East/Front
The phone buzzed in his hand, alive with message after message.
Oh, fucking hell. Jonathan felt slack, like a spool of twine that had lost its spindle, his train of thought falling off him in unraveling threads.
He should never have ignored Roy. The driveway camera had snapped a photo of his truck as he’d rolled in. Exterior 2 showed Roy moving toward the front door. He’d left his truck door open.
Roy had crossed over to his right. Exterior 3 showed him slip past the office window to the side of the house.
Alert: Exterior_4 East/Side
Jonathan sucked in a cold breath that needled in his teeth. In a short pause in the stream of alerts, he looked around the corner of the restroom alcove, back toward the table. Donna and Carly were deep in brow-furrowed conversation. Carly raised her hands in a big, angry non-Carly-like shrug. Jonathan’s chest ached at the sight of it.
Alert: Exterior_3 East/Front
Alert: Exterior_2 Front Door
A foggy blankness covered the place in his mind where he kept his plan. He couldn’t fit this into what he could no longer see clearly. Roy was probably banging on his front door right now, croaking out his brokenness on John’s front stoop for everyone to hear with that stupid dilapidated truck idling in the driveway. Shit.
Alert: Interior_1 Foyer
Roy was inside. Jonathan sprinted for the parking lot.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
* * *
Before he set out for John’s house, Roy wanted to time himself with the stopwatch. It would help him to know how long it would take, how long he’d have to hold on to get through the list: break the window, open the door, walk in—six steps at the most—lift it from the wall, six steps back, The End. His guts cramped grossly if he tried to imagine doing it, seeing the street sign, what the door would look like, a broken window, John’s house. OhJohn’sHouse. The place where he lived. His nice things. How much John would hate Roy for being there.
But if it was just a number of seconds, if he could just think of it like that . . .
He couldn’t find it. The stopwatch had been in the passenger seat. He was sure of it. He checked under the lace pillow, under the plastic bags from the convenience store. He shook crumbs all over the seats from a chip bag and one from pork rinds in case the stopwatch had slid into one of those by accident. This was taking too long. Sweat slipped down his back and glued his hair to his neck. The air felt like he was sucking it through a wet rag. Way too long. Roy started counting as he piled his things on the asphalt, checking everything on the way out, just to double-check the same stuff as he threw it all back in.
Beating the clock was an old trick to keep himself focused, to push worry aside so it wouldn’t distract him so much. It kept fear a little bit further away. Like garlic for a vampire. That’s what his mother had said. She’d taught him the little habit after she’d gotten sick, to help him get through his chores so he didn’t get in trouble with his grandmother. It only took ninety-six seconds to load the sheets into the machine and start the laundry. She bled a lot in those last days. He was eleven.
The next best thing to timing with the watch was counting. It put his mind a little steadier. So he kept counting, then and now. He’d once made it to four hundred and nine when his grandmother beat him with a broom handle.
The sun was searing as he rummaged in the back seat. Four hundred ten, four hundred eleven . . .
He knew the stopwatch was in here somewhere. But when the count got to six hundred, he wasn’t sure anymore if he was right. He thought he remembered having the watch out one day on the work site. Did he leave it? No, he put it back. He was almost positive. The muscles in his arm trembled. His legs were going rubber. And was he at six hundred going over to seven hundred or should he only be heading into the six hundreds now? He should have parked in the shade.
The timer was under the seat, pinned by a shoe box—filled with coins, an American-flag bandanna stiff with dirt, an empty key ring with a crumbling stress squeezer on it, and a pack of mints melted solid.
He should throw that stuff away. There was a trash can across the parking lot. It was just junk. His eyes roamed the piles of stuff in the truck, the silhouette like a mountain range. He put the box back under the seat.
It took twenty-four seconds to tie his boots.
He could hold his breath for forty-one seconds. Fifty-six if he counted the exhale and dragged it out until his lungs burned.
Marcelline had shown him that the picture on the wall in John’s house was close to the door. It might take only as long to tie his boots as to break the window and get inside John’s house. Then six steps. That’s all. Six steps, twelve round-trip, not hurrying. It only took him twelve seconds.
And he would be hurrying.
Less time than it took to tie his boots plus way less time than he could hold one breath altogether. He could be brave for that long. Please.
It would be done. Done. Done right. Please.
Walking in and out of the alley, holding a gun, not shooting it, should have taken thirty-nine seconds. At the most. He’d spent all that day timing himself, and it was what he’d thought the worst case would be—thirty-nine horribly scary seconds. It would be less time if he could be better, if he could not be pulled under a tidal wave of freezing fear. But thirty-nine seconds was the worst that could happen. It wasn’t that bad.
He’d been to the liquor store, but couldn’t feel the raspberry minis. And he’d already been shaking when he drank the first can of energy drink, so he couldn’t tell if that was working either. He’d had three total since putting all his stuff back in the truck, with one vodka each in the first two cans, and two poured into the last one. He couldn’t feel any of it. Please.
His fingers were numb and he caught himself holding his breath even without the stopwatch.
Please.
Please.
Let it be over.
Please.
CHAPTER TWENTY
* * *
The second time Jonathan looked at the dashboard and saw that he was driving better than fifteen miles an hour over the speed limit, he set the cruise control. It killed him to do it. He wanted to fly, teleport, reverse fucking time to be there before Roy had ever gotten to the house. But he needed to be careful. He might actually burst into flames if he got pulled over.
The traffic light on the road ahead jumped up to yellow. Goddammit.
He glanced into the rearview mirror, but it was more automatic than informative. Everything was panic blurred. He pressed his foot down hard on the accelerator and took the intersection arguably in time, an argument he begged the universe not to make him have right now. He checked the mirror more earnestly for a cop. Nothing.
Rush hour was at full clog. In clear lanes, he would have made it home in less than twenty-five minutes, but at the twenty-five-minute mark, he was only marginally past halfway there. He was hot and nauseated, his mouth dry, his skin thrumming, and he hated every single person on the road in front of him. He needed to scream and pound the steering wheel, but he didn’t know what that could unleash. Once he started, he might not be able to stop.
A clear spot opened up and he changed lanes without signaling and cursed again under his breath. He checked one more time for flashing lights behind him and tried not to count time.
Interior 1 had alerted twice in the first mile that he was out of the restaurant.
Speeding was bad. Speeding and weaving through traffic was worse. Speeding and swerving and checking the texts from his home security app was madness. But he did it anyway. He had to know.
He was almost home. Roy hadn’t touched the coat closet yet.
That Interior 1 had been silent for almost forty-five minutes was scarcely good news. If Roy had left the house, the exterior cameras would have reported it back. His phone was convulsing with texts and calls from Donna, but nothing from the cameras. Roy was still inside. But he hadn’t been back into the foyer in a while. What the fuck is he doing in there?
The tires whined in his too-fast turn into the neighborhood. Jonathan eased his foot off the gas. The muscles in his right leg trembled in protest. His throat clicked and spasmed when he tried to swallow nothing down a dry throat.
A neighbor he’d seen before but never spoken to stiff-legged it down the sidewalk in shiny green shorts and a thick white headband that could only have been brand-new. It glowed in the lowering light like a halo that had lost its float. The man pumped his arms unself-consciously high, smiling as he did it, or maybe wincing.
As Jonathan drew even with him, the guy worked a friendly wave into the rhythm of his postdinner power walk. Jonathan waved back as the man flailed past him. Then he checked the mirror—both to see if the man kept going and also just to see it one more time, to know that he wasn’t hallucinating. The exchange belonged in a dream given the murder on his mind.
He forced down a big breath to stretch the tightness in his chest and slid his hands back and forth over the wheel to still the tremors that were threatening to wrench them out of his control. He filed away another huge breath, but the calm it brought faded with the exhale.
He had to preserve his options. That meant absolutely no speeding through the neighborhood. No screeching into the driveway. No running. No yelling. No launching anything—word or deed—that might need to be taken back.
He coasted down his street looking for anyone who was looking at him. No concerned faces appeared at any doors suddenly thrown open. No curtains twitched as he went by. A listless kid at the first house on Jonathan’s block was staring off into a daydream while his arthritic old dog raised its leg at the post of the streetlight.