13

Fourteen years earlier
Charleston, South Carolina—December 2002

“Okay,” Bill said as they sat there on the deck of the rented beach house in Charleston, “I’ll tell you what I do.”

“Good,” Ella said, but she was as nervous as she’d been three years ago when she was sixteen and missed her period—an occasion that turned out to be a false alarm.

“Like I told you, I assist lawyers, defense lawyers,” Bill said.

“But I don’t know what that means,” Ella said.

“If you’ll stop talking, I’ll tell you.” Then he smiled to take the edge off his words. “Let’s say a man runs over another man with his car and flees the scene and is later caught by the police.”

“You mean a hit-and-run,” Ella said.

“Exactly. And in this particular case, let’s say three witnesses saw the man commit the crime. They got his license plate number, or maybe he stepped out of the car and they were able to identify him. You with me?” It really irritated her when he did that, like she was too slow to keep up, but all she did was nod.

“Well, the man’s lawyer might ask me to help out. In this case, that means I need to make sure the three witnesses don’t testify, or that if they do testify, they say they were mistaken and can’t identify the driver.”

“So what did you do?” Ella said. “And stop pretending this is all hypothetical.”

Bill gave her a little, rueful okay-you-got-me smile. “This was actually the first job I had, and it turned out to be fairly simple. One of the witnesses, a guy who was about one step from being evicted from his house, I just paid to lie when he testified, and that’s what he did. He got on the stand and said he’d had quite a bit to drink that night and really didn’t see the driver all that well.”

“Okay,” Ella said.

“The second witness was a kid. He was eighteen years old, living on his own, just like you when I met you. He had a shitty job at a Home Depot stocking shelves from midnight till six and was taking about one class a quarter at some community college to get a degree. He was renting a room in this old lady’s house, and to keep the rent low, he mowed the lawn and fixed shit and was basically the old lady’s slave.

“Well, I found out he wanted to be a writer and was always talking about going to Europe, so I sat down with him one day and handed him an airline ticket—a one-way ticket to Paris that departed the day the trial started. I picked Paris because I figured he’d probably read stories about Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald writing in some little café on the Left Bank.”

“Left bank of what?” Ella said.

“The Seine River; we’ll see it together one day. Anyway, I explained to him that I didn’t want him to appear at the trial and that in addition to the ticket, I’d give him enough cash so he could bum around Europe for six months.

“He wasn’t a terrorist, his name wasn’t on any sort of watch list, and the prosecutor wouldn’t even know he’d left the country until it was too late. I told him once the trial was over, he could go wherever he wanted. He was a bright kid and his life sucked and he knew an opportunity like this might never come along again. He took the deal.”

“Huh,” Ella said. “And the third witness?”

“The third witness was a problem. He was an upstanding citizen—married, had a decent job and a kid. He wasn’t rich but he didn’t have much debt, so I wasn’t sure I could buy him off. I followed him for two months to see if he had any vices, like seeing hookers or visiting gay bars on the down low—something I could use to blackmail him—but he was squeaky clean.”

“So did you kill him?” Ella said.

“No,” Bill said—but he didn’t say it like: My God, of course not. I’d never do that. He just said, “No.”

“What I did was kidnap his little girl.”

“Jesus, Bill!” Ella said.

“Well, ‘kidnap’ is maybe a little strong. I picked up his daughter from her day care place, told the idiot day care lady I was little Susie’s uncle, and took her to a petting zoo. I bought her an ice cream cone and a balloon, and we actually had a pretty good time. Four hours later, when her parents were frantic, I dropped her off at a store near her house and called the dad and told him where his daughter was. But I told him that if he testified against the driver, his kid would disappear and he’d never see her again. It helped that the driver was rumored to have connections to a Mexican drug cartel—this was in Texas—but the truth was he wasn’t connected to them in any way.”

“And I take it the dad didn’t testify,” Ella said.

“Nope. Got amnesia on the stand, and the defendant walked.”

“Huh,” Ella said. “Would you have done it?”

“Done what?”

“Disappeared the little girl if he testified?”

“Of course not. Not only was she a little girl, but if the guy had testified against the driver at the trial, the game would have been over. I took a stupid risk as it was taking her, and I’ve never done anything that dumb again, but I bluffed the guy and it worked. If it hadn’t, there was no way I would have hurt a kid.”

He paused and said, “Now you understand what I do, Ella. So are you going to come with me when I leave Charleston?”

Ella’s mind was spinning.

She’d fallen in love with a criminal.

“Judging by where we’re living right now,” she said, “what you do pays pretty well.”

“I don’t work cheap, and I only take cases where the defendant is very rich. I’m not going to risk going to prison for a few thousand bucks.”

“So how much do you charge?”

Bill hesitated. They’d never talked about money before. “A million per case,” he finally said.

“Jesus,” Ella said. Now, that was impressive.

“So what are you going to do, Ella? Are you going to come with me or not?”

“Bill, I’m going for a walk. I need to think.”

Ella stepped off the deck, walked through the dunes, and went down to the beach. She took off her sandals and strolled along the edge of the water, where every once in a while a cold wave would come in and tickle her feet.

“Well, Ella Sue,” she said out loud, “what are you gonna do?”

She called herself Ella Sue only when she felt particularly stupid.

Falling in love with a disbarred lawyer and self-confessed criminal was definitely not on her things-to-do list. Her plan had always been to marry a rich man, figuring if things didn’t turn out the way she wanted, she would divorce him—and she’d divorce him while she still looked good enough to snag another man. If the man insisted she sign a prenup, she’d make him see what he’d be missing if he didn’t marry her, then walk away—and he’d tear up the prenup and beg her to come back. And when she divorced him, she’d end up with a big house, a fancy car, and a pile of cash. Maybe not enough cash to live on for the rest of her life, but enough to let her live in style until she could marry another rich man.

Yep, that had been her plan—and that plan had just flown out the window like a big-ass bird.

She loved Bill Cantwell, no doubt about it, but more important than love was that he was just about perfect in so many ways. Not only was he fun to be around, but he’d broadened her horizons; she was growing in so many ways because of him. Best of all, he seemed to have money to burn, which you’d expect if he made a million on each job—unless, of course, he was lying about that.

But what would happen to her if they arrested him—which was certainly a possibility. If she were living with him, they’d probably think she was his accomplice, and she might get arrested, too. She was not going to end up in prison, and she wasn’t going to wait around for him if he ended up in prison. And although he’d never brought up the subject of marriage—and she hadn’t pressed him on it—what if they got married? He’d already told her he didn’t own a home—he just lived wherever his work took him—so she wouldn’t end up with a house if they divorced. For that matter, she might not end up with half his money in a divorce, either. She didn’t know for sure, but she figured that if he made his money illegally, the government might be able to take whatever he had. Or that, because he made his money illegally, he hid it somewhere, like in an offshore account or buried under a damn rock. Whatever the case, she might not see a dime of his money as his ex-wife.

“So what are you gonna do, Ella Sue?” she said again. This was not a time to get emotional. This was a time for cold-blooded, dispassionate logic. This was her life she was talking about.

The smart thing would be to walk away. She was only nineteen years old. She had plenty of time to find another man. But would another one like Bill—minus the criminal history, that is—ever come along? Then there was Bill’s age. He was a virile thirty-five right now, but still sixteen years older than her. His being sixteen years older didn’t make much difference now, when she was nineteen and he was thirty-five, but it could make a lot of difference when he was old and sick and senile; she did not intend to become some old man’s nursemaid.

Yeah, no doubt about it, it was time to walk away.

Hell, it was time to run away.

Ella returned to the beach house. Bill was still sitting on the deck, drinking a beer, looking out at the waves slapping the beach.

“Looks like the wind’s picking up,” he said. “I wonder if it’s going to rain tonight.” When she didn’t answer—could he possibly think she wanted to talk about the fucking weather?—he turned to face her. “Well?” he said.

“I’ll go with you on two conditions,” Ella said.

“Okay.”

“First, we’re going to get married.”

To hell with cold-blooded logic.

Bill smiled at her. “Darling, nothing on this earth would make me happier. What’s the second condition?”

“We’re going to have a serious—and I mean serious—talk about money.”