6 weeks after the shot
“How’s it feel to be a dead man?” said Kennedy.
Even though he’d had time to rest and recover from the ordeal, the fed still looked like hammered shit.
“I feel a damn sight better than you look. You ever sleep?” I asked.
“Not much. Not since Ferrar’s funeral. I saw you there, but it wouldn’t have gone down well with the rest of the Bureau if we’d spoken. You understand?”
I nodded.
“Look, I know your business took a dive after the Times told everyone you were dead, but we had no choice. We had to let this blow over. The State Department, the Treasury Department, and the Justice Department are all up in arms about renegade CIA operatives setting up a joint task force to carry out the largest robbery ever committed on American soil. The CIA have said they’re carrying out their own investigation.”
“I’m sure that’ll be extremely thorough. They have to know exactly what happened so they can make sure it’s buried for good.”
Kennedy smiled and said, “You could be right. I’d say none of this will go public—too embarrassing. It’ll all blow over. In the meantime, I figured it would be good to take the heat off you and your family for a while. If everyone thinks you’re six feet under, the cartel won’t go looking for a dead man.”
“You find the money yet?”
He shook his head. “The virus David unwittingly uploaded wiped the whole system. We believe the virus and the money switching into David’s client account and then into the wind was Bernard Langhiemer’s work…”
His face darkened at the mention of Langhiemer.
“You find him yet?” I asked.
“Most of him,” said Kennedy. “It looks like Dell’s partner, Sophie, was hiding out in Langhiemer’s apartment. El Grito found them, got Langhiemer and Sophie talking. It wasn’t pretty.”
“So you think the cartel knows it was Dell who robbed them?”
“We think so, but we’re making sure of it. We don’t want a bloodbath while they go looking for the money. At the same time as we’re covering this up in the press, we’re leaking to our sources in the cartel that Dell went renegade and that we recovered the money. That way no one will come looking for it from David or Christine. The cartel are sore about their man getting plugged, but it turns out El Grito had already fed back to his boss that the firm was tearing itself apart, what with Sinton killing Ben Harland and his daughter.”
“His daughter?”
“We got a positive ID last week on Samantha Harland being the body in David’s apartment. DNA profiling from her old man’s body. We also got a toxicology report. Turns out she’d been given a powerful sedative. We figure Sophie brought her into David’s apartment the day before the murder, drugged her, and stashed her in the soundproof panic room. The next day, after David leaves the apartment, she shoots Samantha in the back, then drags her into the kitchen and unloads into the back of her head. Samantha was twenty-six years old. Assholes like her father never think that what they get into might end up hurting their kids.”
I gazed out at the street.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean…”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“I think it’s best if you lie low for a while, and when you want to practice law again, we’ll get the Times to print a retraction. If the cartel found out you’d made it out of there alive, they’d kill you on principle. But they’ve got short memories when it comes to straitlaced lawyers. Sometimes killing an ordinary Joe Public is much more difficult than taking out a player.”
“I understand,” I said.
“Don’t suppose your memory has improved?” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“The sniper hole cut in the glass on the thirty-eighth floor of the Corbin Building, the fact that Dell and Sophie Blanc all had bullet wounds consistent with a round from a high-caliber rifle? Any of this ringing any bells yet?”
“I already told you, I don’t know anything about that.”
I finished off my stack of blueberry pancakes, drained the last of my coffee, and left forty bucks on the table for the check and the tip.
“David pay you for the prelim?” said Kennedy.
“Way too much,” I said. My financial worries were over, at least for now.
A horn sounded outside Ted’s Diner, and I shook hands with Kennedy.
“That’s my ride,” I said.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” said Kennedy, handing me a large manila envelope. I checked its contents, shook hands with Kennedy again, and placed the envelope in my bag, beside two others of similar size.
It was late April, and the blossoms were tumbling through the puddles on the sidewalk. I opened the rear passenger door of the Range Rover and climbed in.
“This is a mighty step up from that Honda,” I said, gritting my teeth at the stretch to get into the high vehicle. The wound in my chest still hurt like hell when I least expected it. It would heal, but I’d been told to expect an ugly scar.
Holly pulled into traffic and looked at me in the rearview mirror. “I know,” she said. “You could say our relationship has moved on. David wanted to get me a Ferrari, but I told him it was too ostentatious. This is nice.” David leaned over from the front passenger seat and whispered something to her. She patted his knee and they laughed softly together. When David got released the day after Saint Patrick’s, Holly took him in. Through all the shit they went through over those two days, they’d somehow found each other. I was glad.
“So, you ready?” said David.
The question wasn’t meant for me. It was directed toward the other passenger, in the seat beside me. He didn’t answer. He just stared out the window.
David and I talked a little during the drive, and Holly told me all about their plans for a romantic weekend away—their first. The other passenger never spoke. After an hour, when we were well into upstate New York, we fell into silence as we approached our destination. Holly and David were very much in love. It was nice to see, but it made me ache. Christine and Amy were staying at Christine’s parents’ house. I’d seen them both, briefly, once I got out of the hospital. We’d agreed to meet in the park.
I’d watched Amy on the swing. Christine and I sat on the grass in the little park close to her parents’ house. After a while I purposefully tuned out Christine and watched my daughter. I didn’t want to hear what she was saying. She said there was something about me that brought danger to our lives, that somehow, as long as I was in the law, I would attract bad men. And bad things would happen, whether I wanted to do the right thing or not.
Christine and Amy would live with her parents in the Hamptons. Amy would change schools. I could see Amy once a month, at their house. No more. Not for a while. Not until Christine was sure they would be safe. I tuned out again and stared at Amy.
“So what do you think?” said Christine.
“I’m sorry?” I said.
“You haven’t really been listening, have you? I said how would you feel if we tried things again in six months?”
“You mean us?”
“Yes, I mean us.”
The creak of the swing drew my eyes to Amy again. She was getting taller. Her feet were dragging on the ground on every low point of the swing. I’d taken her to this same park the year before and her feet couldn’t touch the ground then. I thought about finding a bloodied seventeen-year-old girl in my client’s house, not a mile from here; I thought about David, fighting for air in the courthouse conference room as he begged me to help him; I thought about Christine, that moment in Harland and Sinton before I got her out.
“I can’t. I love you both too much,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Bad things happen around me. Maybe I let them happen. I don’t know, Christine. I can’t take the risk that something might happen to you or Amy. I don’t want to put distance between us, and I want to watch my little girl grow up. But it’s more important that she gets the chance to grow up and be with you. Whatever has happened to me, whatever’s happened to us, I can’t change that. All I can do is make sure that I don’t do any more harm than I’ve done already.”
“Eddie, it’s not forever. I want to try again when things have calmed down. It’s your job; it’s not you. I thought you could think about winding down the rough cases, maybe even trying a new career. And hey, I’m not blameless here either. What happened with the firm wasn’t your fault.”
“You’re wrong. Dell told me I was the target, not you. They wanted to use me to get to David. You were leverage to them, nothing more. I can’t expose you or Amy to that risk. As things stand, I’m a dead man. That facade won’t last for long. I can spend the weekend here, but I need to go back.”
“Why?”
“Because I have to. I can’t really explain it, but I need this. I need to work. I can help people. David reminded me of that.”
“There are other lawyers…”
“I know, but most of them are probably like I was before I pulled Hanna Tublowski out of that house. If I’m not there, who’ll pull out the next girl?”
She dragged herself close to me, rested her head on my shoulder.
I was going to be on my own. For the good of my family. That made me think about what kind of a man I was, that my family was better off without me—without the hustler, the lawyer, the con man.
Holly made a left and drove along a narrow gravel path that led to a large mansion, set in acres of open green fields.
We pulled up outside the house. Several men were waiting outside, dressed in white hospital uniforms. I got out of the car, walked around, and opened the other passenger door. The low morning sun blazed into the car. This place wasn’t advertised on the Internet, or anywhere else for that matter. Maybe a hundred doctors in the whole country knew of its existence. As far as I knew, the house didn’t even have a name. Rock stars, movie stars, the überwealthy came here to get clean.
Popo wept as he got out of the Range Rover. He was shaking, and his lips were cut and bleeding. I told him to stop biting his lips. David and Holly joined us.
“You’ll stay here until you’re better. Until you’re clean,” said David. “And when you’re clean, you come see me, and I’ll make sure you have a job at Reeler.”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to say,” said Popo.
“You don’t need to say anything. You saved my life. Whatever I can do to save yours, you got it,” said David.
I knew Popo would make it. He’d been given a chance to turn his life around, to become another version of himself, a better version, a stronger version, a purer version. A chance to get back to who he really was.
I hoped I would get the same chance someday.
We waved goodbye to Popo and got back into the Range Rover.
“Okay, now to business,” I said. “You can drop me off at Hogan Place.”