The Last Act: A Novel

by Brad Parks

  CHAPTER 37

  Herrera’s eyes scanned the horizon again, looking for that large, telltale swirl of dust approaching Rosario No. 2 that told him a phalanx of Range Rovers was bearing down.

  Even a beater pickup truck, poking along at thirty miles an hour, barely kicking up any dirt at all, could trigger a minor panic attack in him. Or the glinting windshield of an aging Datsun. Anything, really. Herrera had taken to keeping binoculars around his neck, just so he could rule out non-threats more quickly.

  He just never knew when El Vio might be coming. Be unpredictable.

  This sense of dread had followed Herrera ever since he had returned to Mexico. El Vio had known about the operation in Georgia, of course. Herrera had required too many men and too much money for El Vio not to know about it.

  And, therefore, Herrera had no choice but to inform El Vio about his failure. New Colima had a private-key encrypted e-mail server where messages permanently erased themselves after forty-eight hours. It was as secure as could be, so Herrera had written out a detailed description of his efforts in Georgia to El Vio’s account.

  His reply, which came back fourteen minutes later, was simply: “Okay.”

  And it left Herrera wondering: Was that “okay,” as in, “I applaud your initiative and atrevido, even though the results weren’t what we wanted”? Or would El Vio soon be making one of his inspections, ready to promote someone else into Herrera’s position?

  There were times when Herrera swore that if he saw one of those long plumes traveling his way, he’d flee.

  But where would he go? Where could he hide?

  No. He would simply hold his chin high, meet El Vio’s gaze, and tell him, I am still your man. I will get this done.

  Still, the anticipation was brutal. And that’s why he was at the edge of Rosario No. 2, his eyes scanning the distance, when one of the lieutenants called to him.

  “General,” he said.

  Herrera turned as the lieutenant continued, “There’s something that requires your attention in the bunker immediately. It’s regarding West Virginia.”

  Herrera didn’t need to hear more. He dropped his gaze and walked across the hardscrabble soil and into the reinforced concrete structure. The lieutenant led him to one of several computer terminals, where an audio file was cued up.

  The United States government wasn’t the only entity with its ears trained on the phone traffic coming out of FCI Morgantown.

  Herrera listened to the conversation regarding the banker three times. He knew who the recipient of the call was, of course. But who was this man initiating the call? How did he factor in? And how had he gotten close to the banker?

  So many unanswered questions. Herrera dragged the audio file to a place where he could listen to it again if needed.

  Then he pulled out his phone and called one of the contractors in America to demand answers.

  CHAPTER 38

  After dinner and before the card game that night, I relayed to Mitch an edited version of my conversation with Danny. I played up Danny’s side of it, to make it seem like my FBI buddy had been more enthusiastic. But Mitch remained noncommittal.

  “You’ll talk to your friend at noon tomorrow?” he asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “Then I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”

  And wait I did. I waited all through the card game. Then I waited through a long night, made longer because Frank had a cold and was snoring like a one-man thunderflash.

  When Saturday morning came, there was the usual excitement of visiting hours, which was not something that ever applied to me. I avoided the chatter about it—Hey, Pete, how come no one ever visits you?—in my usual way, by burying myself in a book. It was a thriller called Say Nothing, by an author I had never heard of.

  I probably averaged a peek at my watch every six minutes or so, which is not a recommended technique for making time go by faster.

  At quarter of noon, I went over to the phone bank, ready to wait on line and establish a position at one of them. But that didn’t prove necessary. There was no one else around.

  When my watch hit 11:59:40, I started dialing Danny’s number, punching the buttons slowly enough to fill those final, plodding twenty seconds.

  After the usual delays and recordings, I heard, “Hey, how’s it going?”

  I took a breath, thought about my less-than-one-in-fifteen odds, and decided to roll the dice with uncoded speech again.

  “Talk to me,” I said. “What did your boss say?”

  “We got a deal.”

  I wasn’t celebrating yet. “What kind of deal?”

  “Everything you asked for. We talked with David Drayer, and he’s willing to recommend to the judge that Dupree be let off with time served on account of his extraordinary cooperation.”

  “Good. You told him to keep this zipped, right? Don’t file anything yet?”

  “Of course.”

  “Okay. Go on.”

  “So, time served. Full entry into WITSEC, which means a new identity, relocation, a salary, and a place to live until he finds a job and becomes self-sufficient. Plus we’ll give him a million dollars, conditional upon indictments. However, and my SAC was very explicit about this, we need the documents first. Nothing happens—and I mean nothing—until we have our hands on those documents and have our attorneys verify that they’re legit.”

  “What if he wants to do it the other way around? What if he wants to be out first and then tell you where the documents are?”

  “No can do. This is a hundred percent bureau policy. We’ve been burned too many times. Think what you want about your friend’s innocence, he’s still a convicted felon. You seem to have forgotten that, but we sure haven’t.”

  “I understand,” I said. “But are you sure your attorneys can be quiet about this? These documents are the only thing keeping him alive.”

  “You’d have my personal assurance that nothing would be filed until both of you are out of there. Same with his family. The FBI isn’t perfect, but we aren’t in the business of letting civilians get slaughtered.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Anything else?”

  “Not that I can think of.”

  “Great. Keep your phone close. Let me see what our friend has to say.”

  A Get Out of Jail Free card. A new life under the protection of the world’s most powerful government. A million dollars—seven fat figures with a dollar sign at the front—with which to start it.

  Mitch couldn’t say no to all that, right?

  CHAPTER 39

  It had been a long week for Amanda.

  Her art had been a struggle, as usual. There were too many days when she got a brush in her hand, ready to paint whatever came into her mind, only to find an image of Hudson van Buren, leering at her crotch. And then the day was ruined.

  She still forced herself to paint. Even when it just meant giving the garbage truck more to haul. It was a matter of self-image. An artist without discipline is an unemployed person telling people she’s an artist.

  But the greater struggle, she could admit, was that her good friend—and great distraction—had been out of town. Brock was on a cruise in the Caribbean. He had asked her if she wanted to come at the last minute. He even offered to treat.

  She declined, telling him she was concerned about the Zika virus.

  And that was true. But the larger truth was that it didn’t feel right to do something like that while Tommy was in prison. Even if Tommy would have implored her to go and have a blast, she wouldn’t have been able to enjoy herself. The guilt alone would have destroyed the trip.

  She missed Brock all the same. And she was thrilled when her phone, which had been so silent all week, buzzed with an incoming text early Saturday afternoon. The message itself, however, was puzzling:

  Dinner tonight?
Pick you up at 7? I need to tell you something. Then I need to ask you something.

  She didn’t immediately answer. He wanted to tell her . . . what? And ask her . . . what else? It wasn’t like Brock to be so cryptic. She tried to keep herself from conjecturing.

  Yet she worried. She knew enough about guys and how their minds worked. Brock had been away for a week, allowing him to think. A guy like Brock—so decent, so gentlemanly, so far above making a sleazy move on his friend’s fiancée—would need that kind of time to summon his courage.

  And now he was going to lay his feelings out for her in the most mature, aboveboard way possible. He wanted more from their relationship. More than friendship. More than quick hugs and brotherly pecks on the cheek. He didn’t care that she was pregnant with his friend’s child. He would raise the baby as his own, and then they’d have their own kid together. Maybe two. Blended families were so common now, what did it matter?

  Amanda could see it all coming so easily.

  But what should she do about it? She couldn’t actually consider that proposition, could she?

  Yet the moment she asked the question, her gut answered it for her. Brock was beautiful, sophisticated, smart, rich, and fun; he was the scion of a thriving jewelry business that could launch the Amanda Porter Collection and give her an artistic alternative to her sputtering career as a painter; he had that and a thousand other things going for him that any woman would be lucky to find in a mate.

  But he wasn’t Tommy. She had never once felt that Rice Krispies snap, crackle, pop around him.

  Damn. She missed that sound, that sensation. Missed it like a limb that had been amputated.

  And, yes, things with Tommy were rocky at the moment. Of course they were. She still hadn’t told him about Hudson van Buren. In that respect, they hadn’t had a fully honest conversation in months. Plus he was in prison. What did she expect their relationship to be like?

  When he got out, it would probably take six seconds for them to be back to normal. And normal with Tommy was what she wanted. Now and forever.

  She texted Brock back:

  Sounds great. See you tonight at 7.

  She’d just have to let him down easy.

  CHAPTER 40

  A cold rain was coming down hard enough to make the puddles bounce, which made me think I would find Mitch holed up in Randolph somewhere.

  But he was neither in his room nor in any of the common areas.

  More eager to get his answer than I was to stay dry, I plunged into the elements. I jogged over to the education building, flinching against hydraulic assault the whole way. Except I didn’t find him in the library. Ditto with the cardio gym, the basketball gym, or any of the classrooms.

  It was times like this that I missed my phone sorely. A simple where-are-you text would have solved everything.

  I ran to the dining hall next, to see if he was working an extra shift. But he was not among the postlunch cleanup crew. Then I tried Health Services. By that point, I was wet and chilled enough that the nurse looked at me like she was going to be treating me for pneumonia soon.

  The very last spot I thought he might be was the chapel. Our conversations had covered a wide range of subjects. And yet even though our prison, like most, was a hotbed of spirituality—there are probably more Bible-thumpers per capita in prison than anywhere else in America—Mitch and I had never discussed God, religion, the afterlife, any of it.

  Since I was out of other options, I ran over there anyway. The chapel was supposed to be nondenominational, but it still looked more than vaguely Christian. There were pews and stained glass and an altarish slab of wood at the front of the room with an understated pulpit off to the side. The only thing that kept it from being certifiably Presbyterian was that I don’t think anyone served coffee after the services.

  By the time I entered the building, having completed my third dash across campus, my shirt was soaked through at the shoulders, my pants at the thighs. Wetness was rolling off my head down into my T-shirt. I clomped heavily through the entryway door into the main area of the chapel, my boots making sloshy noises.

  I expected I’d turn right around after taking a brief glance at the place, because it would be empty on a Saturday afternoon. Except there was one guy, sitting in the front pew with his shoulders hunched. He turned around.

  Mitch.

  “Hey,” I said, walking between the pews toward him. “What are you doing here?”

  “Praying.”

  “You pray?”

  “Every day.”

  “But you never go to chapel.”

  “Praying is about having a personal relationship with God,” he said. “I’m not always sure what going to chapel is about, especially around here.”

  Fair point. I had reached the front of the room, where I was dripping on the thin carpet. Everything about the setting—the pews, the altar, his unexpected piety—had distracted me from what I had come there to do.

  “Anyhow, what’s up?” he asked.

  “I was hoping we could talk, actually. But if I’m interrupting . . .”

  “Take a seat,” he suggested.

  I lowered myself onto the edge of a pew and wiped my face with my damp sleeve before I began.

  “I chatted with my FBI buddy,” I said.

  “I figured. And?”

  “And I don’t think . . . I don’t think it should be a difficult decision, to be honest. The deal they’re offering is very, very generous. They’ve agreed to letting you out with time served, putting you in WITSEC, and paying you one million dollars.”

  I emphasized the last three words, to make sure they had the proper impact, then continued: “Plus, I’ve received assurances they won’t make any moves that will tip off the cartel until you and your family are a long, long way from here. It’s really pretty perfect.”

  “And all I have to do is tell them where the documents are, is that right?”

  “Yep,” I said.

  He closed his eyes. The bags underneath them seemed particularly heavy today. I wasn’t the only one in Randolph who hadn’t slept well the previous night. His breathing was slow. He sat perfectly still, consulting whatever higher authority he thought might put some wisdom into his head.

  Then he brought his hands to his temples, massaging them as he opened his eyes. He let out a large breath.

  Then he said, “I’m sorry, Pete. Tell your friend I can’t.”

  I felt something detonate behind my eyeballs. “Why not?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “No, Mitch. Quantum physics is complicated. This is easy. It’s a million bucks, tax-free. It’s getting to be with your wife and kids again.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Sure it is. Look, I know life has dealt you a crappy hand, but there’s nothing you can do to get back that American dream life you had. This is as close as you’re going to get. This is like having to go all in with a seven and a three and winding up with a straight flush. Think about what you can do with a million dollars. You can send your kids to whatever college they want to go to, with plenty left over. You can go on vacations where you and your wife can rent a private little bungalow by the beach and have sex to the sound of crashing waves. You can get a big RV and drive anywhere you want with your family, and it doesn’t matter that you’re getting eight miles to the gallon. You can do anything.”

  He shook his head. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “You’re right. I wouldn’t. So help me. Why would you possibly say no to this?”

  “Why do you care so much?”

  Because this isn’t just your happy future, I thought, picturing Amanda, our baby, getting out of this wretched place, and everything else that hung on his giving the right answer.

  Then, with my character wandering, I scolded myself. Lock it down, Goodrich. Lo
ck it down.

  I squared my shoulders to him and said, “Because you’re my friend. And I want what’s best for you, and I’m . . . Look, I’m stuck in here. We’ve never talked about what I did to get here, and it’s kind of embarrassing, because it was no big, grand conspiracy. I’m just a broke dumbass who got really frustrated one day and robbed a bank. That’s right, Mitch. You worked for a bank, and I robbed one. And I was too stupid to know they put tracking devices in the money, so you can guess how long it took for me to get caught.

  “Point is, there’s no one coming along to offer me a million bucks or my freedom. I’m stuck here for eight years. You want to pray about something? Pray my wife doesn’t leave me between now and then. Pray my five-year-old has some dim shred of a memory of what Daddy looks like by the time I get out, because you can be damn sure the three-year-old and the one-year-old won’t. Pray I’ll be able to find some way to support my family or find my dignity again when I get out, and that having to check ‘yes’ on every employment application that asks if I’m a felon won’t doom me to working at a Popeyes chicken until I die.

  “And that’s what you would be facing too. Except now someone is coming along and giving you a chance to not miss your kids growing up, and to have some semblance of a life worth living, and I . . . I just can’t stand to see you throw that away. So, yeah, take the deal. If not for you, then for me. Knowing you’re out there somewhere will make me feel a little bit freer.”

  It was a lovely monologue, beautifully delivered. And late in the last act of every stage show ever written, it would have won the day.

  But Mitch was just sitting there, shaking his head. “Sorry,” he said again. “I really appreciate you going to your friend for me. I just can’t.”

  I sat there in my puddle on the pew, the wet clothes almost as heavy as my incredulity. First the hunting cabin debacle, now this. Why wasn’t he taking this sweetheart of a deal? What was he waiting for? Two million dollars? A ride out of prison on a white steed? It made no sense.