Leaving the bank, she again looked for the woman with the neck tats and the perfect posture but, if she was in the building, she wasn’t anywhere Rachel could see her. She turned right past the waiting area and saw Manny behind the teller’s window, speaking to Ashley with his chin tilted toward her shoulder. They both looked up as she turned left at the door, Manny’s mouth opening as if he were about to call after her, but she went through the front door and into the parking lot.
Now she had the perfect angle on the cars under the tree, and the sun was cooperating too. Of the four cars that remained, only one was clearly occupied. It was the Chevy that had backed into its spot, and a man sat behind the wheel. It was still too shady to see his features, but it was definitely a man’s head—squared off at the top and at the jaw, ears the size of change purses. No way to tell if he was there to kill her or survey her or if he was simply a middle manager ducking out on his work, a john getting a blow job, or an out-of-town salesman who’d arrived early for an appointment to beat the traffic that clogged I-95 in Providence between eight and ten.
She looked straight ahead as she passed between the Employee of the Month’s car and a van parked in the handicap spot. It too had backed in, the sliding door by her left shoulder now, and she imagined the sound it would make as it was pulled open and hands reached out and yanked her inside.
She passed the van and a long black SUV approached from her right. She watched with a strangely detached fascination as the driver’s tinted window slid down and the driver thrust his arm through the opening even before the window had completed its journey down into the door slot. He wore a dark suit with a white shirt cuff peeking out at the wrist. She hadn’t thought to reach into her bag for the gun or at least try to run back behind the van for cover before his arm reached full extension, a cigarette nestled between the index and middle fingers as he exhaled a grateful plume of smoke, his head pressed against the headrest. He shot her a lazy grin as he passed, as if to say, It’s all about the little pleasures, ain’t it?
After he rolled past, she put her hand in her bag, thumbed the safety off the P380, and kept her hand there as she reached the Range Rover. She opened the door with her left hand and climbed inside. Put the bag on the front passenger seat and the gun on the console beside her, finger still on the trigger, safety off. She said, “You still there?”
“Had a few birthdays while you were gone,” he said mildly. “Fucking took you so long?”
“Really?” She removed her finger from the trigger, thumbed the safety back on, and put the gun in the space between her seat and the console. “That’s my greeting?”
“Gosh, hon, you look beautiful. Is that a new something? You look like you dropped a few pounds too. Not that you ever needed to.”
“Fuck you,” she said, surprised to hear a chuckle trail the words.
He laughed. “My bad. How’d everything go? Should probably start the engine, by the way, and do the phone trick if we’re going to keep talking.”
She turned the car on. “Couldn’t they assume I’m going hands-free on the cell?”
“You’re not wearing a headset and you’re driving a car from 1992.”
She put the phone to her ear. “Touché.”
“Was there a plant in the bank?”
She pulled out of the slot, turned toward the exit. “Hard to tell. There was a girl in the waiting area I’m still unsure about.”
“How about the parking lot?”
“One guy in a car in the employee section. Couldn’t tell if he was watching us or not.”
She reached the road.
“Turn right,” Brian said.
They drove up a mild incline and then passed a cluster of clapboard houses—most red, a few blue, the rest faded to the brown-gray of old baseballs. Once they passed the houses, they hit a straightaway between two pastures that unfurled for miles. The sky that rose before her was a blue she’d seen only in dreams and old Technicolor movies. A bank of white clouds formed in the southeast corner but cast no shadow on the fields. She could see why Brian had chosen this road—there were no crossroads for miles. What was left of Johnston’s farming community, it appeared, was right here.
“Well,” Brian said after about two miles.
“Well what?” She laughed for some reason.
“You see anyone in the rearview?”
She glanced up. The road behind her was a gunmetal ribbon with nothing on it. “No.”
“How far back can you see?”
“I’d guess about two miles.”
After another minute, he said, “Now?”
She looked again. “Nothing. Nobody.”
“Rachel.”
“Brian.”
“Rachel,” he said again.
“Brian . . .”
He sat up in the backseat and the smile that broke across his face was almost too big for the car.
“How do you feel about yourself today?” he asked. “Right now? Pretty fucking bad or pretty fucking good?”
She caught his eyes in the rearview and presumed hers were as adrenalized as his. “I feel . . .”
“Speak it.”
“Pretty fucking good.”
He clapped his hands together and whooped.
She stepped on the gas and punched the roof and let out a howl.
In another ten minutes, they reached another small strip mall. She’d clocked it on the way in; it contained a post office, a sub shop, a liquor store, a Marshalls, and a Laundromat.
“What’re we doing here?” Brian peered at the low-slung buildings, all gray except for the Marshalls, which was white fading to eggshell.
“I need to run a quick errand.”
“Now?”
She nodded.
“Rachel,” he said, and failed to keep a whiff of condescension out of his voice, “we don’t have time to—”
“Argue?” she said. “I agree. Be right back.”
She left the key in the ignition and the bag she’d carried out of the bank at his feet. It took her ten minutes in Marshalls to change out of her Nicole Rosovich outfit and into a pair of jeans, cranberry V-neck tee, and black cashmere cardigan. She handed the tags to the cashier, transferred her previous outfit to a plastic store bag, paid up, and left.
Brian watched her exit and started to sit up, but then his face darkened as she gave him a quick four-finger wave and entered the post office.
She came back out five minutes later. Brian looked a lot paler when she got behind the wheel. Smaller, too, and a little sickly. Her bag still sat at his feet, but he’d clearly gone through it—a stack of bills peeked through the opening.
“You went through my bag,” she said. “So much for trust.”
“Trust?” It came out sharp and high like a hiccup. “My passport isn’t in there. Neither is yours.”
“No.”
“So where are they?”
“I have mine,” she assured him.
“That’s wonderful.”
“I think so.”
“Rachel.”
“Brian.”
His voice was nearly a whisper. “Where’s my fucking passport?”
She reached into the Marshalls bag and retrieved a shipping label, handed it to him.
He smoothed it on his thigh and stared at it for some time. “What’s this?”
“It’s a shipping label. Global Express. Guaranteed from the United States Postal Service. That’s your tracking number right there in the upper right corner.”
“I can see that,” he said. “I can also see you addressed it to yourself as a guest of the Intercontinental Hotel in Amsterdam.”
She nodded. “Is that a good hotel? Have you ever stayed there? It looked good on the website, so I went with it.”
He looked at her like he was thinking about hitting something. Her, perhaps. Or himself. The dashboard possibly.
Probably her, though.
“What did you mail to the Intercontinental Hotel in Amsterdam, Rachel?”
“Your passport.” She started the Range Rover and pulled out of the parking lot.
“What do you mean, my passport?” His voice was, if possible, even quieter. It was how he got in an argument just before he exploded.
“I mean,” she said with the slowness one reserved for very young children, “I mailed your passport to Amsterdam. Which is where I plan to be by tomorrow night. You, on the other hand, will still be here in the States.”
“You can’t do this,” he said.
She looked over at him. “I kinda already did.”
“You can’t do this!” he repeated, but this time he shouted it. And then he punched the ceiling.
She waited to see if he’d hit anything else. After a mile or so, she said, “Brian, you lied to me through our entire marriage and for the year leading up to it. Did you actually think I was going to overlook that? Say, ‘Gosh, you big lug, ya, thanks for looking out for me?’” She turned left at a sign for 95, still ten miles away from the on-ramp.
“Turn the fucking car around,” he said.
“To do what?”
“Get the passport back.”
“You can’t get mail back once you’ve handed it over. Something to do with interfering with a civil servant on his appointed rounds or something.”
“Turn the car around.”
“What’re you going to do?” She was surprised to hear a chuckle trail the words. “Go back and stick up a post office? I’m going to guess they have cameras, Brian. You may get the passport, but by then you’ll have Cotter-McCann, the local police, the state police, and—since this would surely be a federal crime—the FB fucking I on your ass. Is that really the option you most want to explore right now?”
He glowered at her from the other side of the Range Rover.
“You hate me right now,” she said.
He continued to glower.
“Well,” she said, “we always hate the things that wake us up.”
He punched the ceiling again. “Fuck you.”
“Aw, sweetness,” she said, “would you like me to elucidate your remaining options?”
He popped the glove compartment with the side of his fist and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. He lit the cigarette and cracked the window.
“You smoke?” she said.
“You mentioned options.”
She held out her hand. “Give me one.”
He handed her his and lit another one and they drove the empty road and smoked and she felt a hundred feet tall for a moment.
“You can kill me,” she said.
“I’m not a killer,” he said with a weary indignation that fell somewhere between charming and offensive.
“But if you do, you’ll never get your passport. With all the heat on you, even if you could get someone to make you another one, they’d probably charge you a king’s ransom and sell you out to Cotter-McCann anyway.”
She looked in his eyes and saw that she’d scored a direct hit.
“You’ve got no one left to trust, do you?”
He flicked his ash out the crack in the window. “That’s what you’re offering? Trust?”
She shook her head. “That’s what I’m demanding.”
After a while, he asked, “And what’s that look like?”
“It looks like you scurrying around for a few days like a rat with everyone chasing you while me, Haya, and AB wander the canals of Amsterdam.”
“You like that image,” he said.
“And at the appointed time and place, you retrieve the passport I’ll have sent back stateside.”
He sucked so hard on the cigarette the tobacco crackled as it burned. “You can’t do this to me.”
She flicked her own cigarette out the window. “But I already have, dear.”
“I rescued you,” he said.
“You what?”
“From a prison you built for yourself. I spent fucking years getting you ready for this. If that’s not love, then what—”
“You want me to believe you love me?” She pulled to the side of the road and slammed the shift into park. “Then get me out of this country, give me access to the money, and trust I’ll send you the passport.” She stabbed the air between them with her finger, surprised at the swift appearance and infinite depth of her rage. “Because, Brian? There is no other fucking deal on the table.”
He dropped his gaze and looked out at the gray road and blue sky and the fields yellow with the promise of summer.
Now, she thought, comes the moment when he threatens you.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay, what?”
“I’ll give you what you want.”
“And what’s that?”
“Apparently,” he said, “everything.”
“No,” she said, “just faith.”
He gave his own reflection a rueful smile. “Like I said . . .”
Brian texted Haya from the interstate. For the second time in twenty-four hours, he didn’t like her response.
As agreed upon, he wrote,
How’s everything?
If everything was all right, she was supposed to write back,
Perfect.
If anything had gone wrong, she was supposed to respond,
Everything’s fine.
After fifteen minutes, she sent a text back:
All OK.
In Woonsocket, he directed her up the main hill and then south several blocks. They turned onto a dusty scar of a street that dead-ended at a mound of landfill, crumbled Sheetrock, and bent rebar. From there they had a perfect view of the river and the mill and the night watchman’s house. He pulled a pair of binoculars from the glove box and adjusted the focus as he looked down at the house.
“The pantry shade is still up,” he said.
The sparrow flapped twice in her chest.
He handed the binoculars to her and she saw for herself. “Maybe she forgot.”
“Maybe,” he said.
“But you were pretty clear with your instructions.”
“But I was pretty clear with my instructions,” he agreed.
They sat and watched the house for a while, passing the binoculars back and forth, looking for movement of any kind. Once Rachel thought she saw the shade of the far left window on the second floor move, but she couldn’t swear to it.
Still, they knew.
They knew.
Her stomach eddied and for a moment the Earth’s atmosphere felt too thin.
After a little more watching, Brian took the wheel and they drove back down through the neighborhood and he drove a bit beyond where he had last night and approached the mill from a few blocks farther north. They entered the grounds from an old trucking route that ran parallel to the railroad tracks, and in daylight the skeleton of the mill was both more pathetic and more resplendent, like the sun-bleached bones of a slaughtered god king and his once-majestic retinue.
They found the pickup truck parked a few yards into the shell of the building closest to the river. There was no northern wall left and most of the second floor was gone. The truck was a beast of a machine, a black full-size Sierra, all hard form and function, its wheels and sides splattered with dried mud.
Brian put his hand on the hood. “It’s not hot but it’s a little warm. They haven’t been here too long.”
“How many?”
He looked in the cab. “Hard to tell. Seats five. But I doubt they’d bring five.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “Manpower’s expensive.”
“So’s losing seventy million,” she said.
He looked around the mill for a bit and she knew him well enough to know this was how he processed, his eyes clocking his surroundings without actually seeing them.
“You want to confront them?” she said.
“I don’t want to.” He widened his eyes. “But I don’t see a choice.”
“We could skip returning to the house and just run from here.”
He nodded. “You’re willing to leave Haya and the baby behind?”
“We could call the police. Haya doesn’t know anything. She can easily claim ignorance.”
“If the police show up, what’s to stop the guys inside from shooting Haya and the baby? Or shooting the cops? Or entering into a standoff with hostages?”
“Nothing,” she admitted.
“So do you still want to hit the road? Leave them behind?”
“Do you?”
“Asked you first.” He shot her the tiniest of smiles. “What’s it that asshole said to you in Haiti?”
“‘Would you like to be good? Or would you like to live?’”
Brian nodded.
“Can you get us out of here?” she asked.
“I can get you out of here. Can’t get myself out of here the way you’ve fixed it, but I can get you out, honey bunch.”
She ignored the dig. “Right this second?”
He nodded. “Right this second.”
“What’re our chances?”
“Our chances?”
“My chances,” she said.
“About fifty-fifty. Every hour, they drop five percent in Cotter-McCann’s favor. We add a terrified woman and a baby—that’s if we can extricate them from guys who know how to use firearms a lot better than we do—your odds of success drop even further.”
“So right now the odds are about even. But if we go up to that house”—she pointed at the other end of the mill—“it’s more likely we die.”
His eyes widened a little more and he nodded repeatedly. “Way more likely, yeah.”
“And if I say I want to run, you’ll just take me out of here now?”
“I didn’t say that. I said it was an option.”
She looked up through the blackened rafters and the shredded roof at the blue sky. “There’s no option.”
He waited.
“All four of us go.” She took several quick breaths and it made her light-headed. “Or none of us do.”
“Okay,” he whispered and she could see he was as terrified as she was. “Okay.”
She dropped the hammer. “Haya speaks perfect English.”
He squinted at her.
“She grew up in California. She was gaming Caleb.”
He let loose a high chuckle of disbelief. “Why?”
“So he’d rescue her from a shitty life, it sounds like.”
Brian shook his head so many times he resembled a dog after a bath. Then he smiled. The old Brian smile—surprised to be surprised by the turns of the world and somehow tickled at the same time.
“Well, shit,” he said, “I finally like her.” He nodded once. “She told you?”
Rachel nodded.
“Why?”
“So we’d know not to abandon her.”
“I’m not above leaving her behind,” he said simply. “Never was. But I wouldn’t leave Caleb’s kid up there to die. Not even for seventy million.”
He lifted the cover over the tire jack compartment in the Rover and came back with a short ugly shotgun with a pistol grip.
“How many guns do you need?” she asked.
He looked off in the direction of the house as he loaded shells into the gun. “You’ve seen me shoot—I suck. A shotgun levels the playing field a bit.” He shut the hatchback.
Whatever he’d just claimed about being unable to leave Caleb’s daughter behind, it didn’t alter the fact that he could kill her right now with that ugly weapon. It wouldn’t be the rational choice necessarily, but at this point rational choice was a luxury in the rearview mirror.
It didn’t seem to be the first thing on his mind, though, so she opened the driver’s door of the truck. The floor mat was caked with dried mud. She craned her head over the seat and saw the floor mat on the passenger seat was crusted with the same. Wherever they’d been searching for her or Brian lately, they’d walked through some dirt to do it. She opened the rear driver’s-side door—the mats back there were pristine. She could still smell the showroom in the rubber.
She showed it to Brian. “There are only two of them.”
“Unless the other car’s parked somewhere else.”
She hadn’t considered that. “I thought you were Mr. Positive Thinking.”
“We’ll call this an off fucking day then.”
“I mean—” She started but couldn’t finish the thought. Her hand dropped back to her side. She felt closer to vomiting than she had in a while. She mentioned this to Brian.
“Where’s a Scientologist when you need one, uh?” He pointed the shotgun down the end of the building, past mounds of dirt and trash and all the pieces of wall that had been torn out when the scavengers came for the copper wire. “Right at the end there’s a set of stairs. You go down them and you find a really small tunnel.”
“A tunnel?”
He nodded. “Caleb and me dug it over the last couple months. When you thought I was out of the country.”
“Lovely.”
“Figured if we were ever in that house and we had time to see the opposition coming for us, we’d scoot out, get over here, and make a run for it pretty much from where we’re standing now. You can go down—”
“I can?”
“We can, yeah. We’ll crawl over there and—”
“How tight is this tunnel?”
“Oh, it’s bad,” he said. “It’s more like a trough. If I ate a pizza right now, I’d probably get stuck in there.”
“I’m not doing that,” she said.
“You’d rather die?” He waved the shotgun like it was an extension of his arm.
“I’d rather die above ground than below it, yes.”
“You got a better idea?” It came out sharply.
“I haven’t even heard yours. All I’ve heard is the word ‘tunnel.’ And point that fucking thing at the ground, would you?”
He considered the shotgun. He shrugged an apology and pointed it at the ground.
“My plan,” he said calmly, “is that we take the tunnel under the house. We come up in the back bedroom on the first floor. We come out into the house, while they’re peeking out the windows for us.”
“And what’s to stop them from shooting us then?”
“We’ll have the drop on them?”
“The drop?” she said.
“Yes.”
“They’re professionals. A good man with a gun can’t defeat a bad man with a gun if the bad man is at ease in violent confrontation and the good man is not.”
“Fine,” he said, “your turn.”
“What?”
“Your turn,” he repeated. “Give me a better idea.”
She took a minute. It was hard to think over the terror. Hard for any word to find space in her brain besides Run.
She told him her idea.
When she finished, he chewed his lower lip and then the inside of his mouth and then his upper lip. “It’s good.”
“You think?”
He stared at her, as if judging how honest he could afford to be. “No,” he eventually admitted, “it’s not. But it’s better than mine.”
She stepped up close to him. “There’s one big problem with it.”
“Which is?”
“If you don’t do your part, I’m dead within a minute.”
He said, “Maybe even less.”
She took a step back and flipped him the bird. “So how do I know you’ll hold up your end?”
He pulled the pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket and offered her one. She waved it off. He put one between his lips, lit it, and returned the pack to his pocket.
“Be seeing you, Rachel.” He gave her a small shrug and walked off through the mill toward the night watchman’s house and never looked back.