B009XDDVN8 EBOK (23 page)

Something about his smile pissed me off. I gave him another look: short and stocky, with spiky blond hair and those pale gray eyes, dangerous eyes. Suddenly I really really really wanted him to stop talking.

“The owner went to the storeroom,” I said, “but I expect he’ll be right back.”

The man slid a little closer to me. I could smell his cheesy aftershave. Old Spice, the official scent of high-school freshmen.

“Look at that little darling,” he said, referring to one of the smaller guns. “Wouldn’t that be sweet in some bastard’s ear?”

I shifted down the counter away from him and turned my attention back to the form, instinctively shielding my answers with my body like a bratty know-it-all in junior high during a science test. (Of course, at Pitchford Junior High, that bratty know-it-all was me.) After questions about ethnicity and citizenship, form 4473 got to the crux of the matter. A
RE YOU THE ACTUAL BUYER OF THE FIREARMS LISTED ON THIS FORM
? Yes. H
AVE YOU EVER BEEN CONVICTED OF A FELONY
? N
O
. A
RE YOU A FUGITIVE FROM JUSTICE
? That last gave me a bit too much pause. Was I? Had I been running not from Tony Grubbins but instead from justice itself for lo these many years?

“And it’s not just your own self you got to worry about,” said the man in the Old Spice.

“Excuse me?” I said, still working on the form.

“Once the shooting it starts, you never know who’s getting hit. You pay your taxes? Not all you’re supposed to, I’d bet. Not a guy like you.”

I stopped writing, looked up at the man, felt something slip inside me. “What kind of guy is that?”

“I had a pal that tried to get away without paying his taxes. No big deal, we all try to swing it. But when the IRS came after him, instead of just making good on what he owed, he started loading up. Shotguns, scatter guns, pistols out the wazoo. Before he could turn around, the ATF went Ruby Ridge on his ass. He survived, but the wife and one of the kids weren’t so lucky. Things like that happen when you start thinking with the barrel between your legs instead of your brain.”

I looked down at the form for a moment and then back at the man’s unfriendly smile and hard gray eyes. As pale and as implacable as fate itself. So this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with an insufferable stranger wearing Old Spice. “You don’t know me.”

“Maybe I don’t,” he said. “But I sure seen your picture.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a photograph, tossed it on the counter. A grainy black and white of a man going through a metal detector at an airport.

“That’s not me,” I said.

“Close enough,” said the man, and he was right about that.

I closed my eyes and took a breath. What I was feeling just then must have been much like the feeling you get when death falls out of the sky and flutters to a landing on your chest. Horror and fear and relief all at once. Whatever it was I had lived through for the past quarter century, it was finally, irrevocably over. Something new was coming hard and fast, and all I could think was that it was about time.

“What do we do now?” I said.

“First of all, we don’t buy no gun. I already got enough steel for both of us.” He pushed away his jacket to reveal a holstered pistol.

“Okay.”

“Then you give me your cell phone.”

“Why?”

“Just give it up,” he said, reaching out his hand. I took my cell out of my pocket, put it in his open hand.

“BlackBerry, huh? Old school, with a keyboard instead of the touch screen. Nice. How’s your reception here?”

“Fine.”

“I don’t get crap. I’m stuck with AT&T. I want to go Verizon, but with the contract they got me by the balls, you know what I mean?”

“Yes.”

“I bet you do at that.” The man stuffed the BlackBerry in a jacket pocket. “Now we go outside and I follow you back to your house.”

“You’ll follow me?”

“What’s the Beemer worth, even used, twenty, thirty? No need to leave that here. At your house, we collect what’s left of the cash.”

“It’s gone. I spent it all.”

“Yeah, yeah, so you say. But still I got my orders to give the house a shakedown, like we did with your pal in Vegas. And then we’ll sit around the dining table with you and your family and figure something out.”

“They’re not part of it.”

“They are now.”

“You stay the hell away from them.”

His pale gray eyes stayed calm at my outburst, but it was a calm that slapped me into silence. It was all there, in that stillness, not just the violence he was undoubtedly capable of, but also that he just might enjoy it.

“There’s a way this can go,” he said, slowly, patiently, as to a child, “in which the damage is kept to a minimum. There’s also a different way this can go. I don’t care; for me it’s just a job and most of my jobs are messy. So the decision is yours. How do you want to play it?”

“Clean.”

“That’s what I figured.”

“And if I run?”

He reached over and pulled the form from beneath my hand. “First I’ll catch you,” he said calmly as he gave the paper a scan. “And then I’ll hurt you. And then we’ll still head on over to that fancy development where I picked you up. How’s the wife, she a looker? If she is, that will make things more pleasant.”

“Look, I’m sure you and I, we can work something out. Off the record. How much to walk away?”

“You want to pay me off.”

“That’s the way it works, isn’t it?”

“You see, this is the thing that got you in trouble in the first place. You have no idea who you are dealing with. Go on, now.”

He jerked his head toward the door, and I stood there for a moment, my eyeballs spinning as I considered my options. Then
my posture slumped, as if my spine had been extracted, and I headed for the exit. I had just opened the door—ding-a-ling—when the old guy in the overalls came out of the back room with a large brown box.

“Mister,” he said, “where you going? I got your merchandise.”

“He won’t be needing that pistol no more,” said the man in the black jacket. “But if you don’t mind, I sure could use a carton of Newpees for the road.”

I
T WAS A
long, elegiac drive back to Patriots Landing, as somber as a sprinter’s funeral. Our small procession, my BMW and the blue rental Ford following close behind, was marking the death of an era. For a quarter of a century I had been on the run, taking wild gambles, devising devious strategies, plotting exits, racing ecstatically around the whole of the country to keep the wolves at bay. It had become not just a path of prudent precaution, it had become the richest part of my life. My past was painful, my present was confused and disappointing, yet no matter how life batted me about, I always had the warming knowledge that I had gotten away with something, something huge. Now, having finally been caught, I felt bereft, pale, weak, and useless, as if meaning had been bled out of my very existence.

My life as I had known it was over; all that was left was managing the aftermath. And even that was too optimistic a pronouncement, as if there were any managing I could actually do.

A cop car approached from the other direction, and I had the urge to flag him down with my lights. That would put an end to the immediate threat to my life—and with the statute of limitations having passed on the Grubbins caper I wouldn’t even end up in jail—but then what? What could the police actually do about my problem? The bastard with the Old Spice would be gone before I even pulled over to the side of the road, and while
I was still trying to explain the whole story to the incredulous officer, Old Spice would be wreaking havoc on my house, and maybe on my family. No, I had to keep him as close as he had to keep me.

I swiveled my head as the cop passed, felt an opportunity vanish, and looked back at the road in front of me. With each mile that passed beneath me I came a mile closer to Patriots Landing, and with each mile my wretchedness rose.

I needed to make a deal. I should have called Clevenger when I had some of my anonymity left still to trade. Now my cover was blown, my location was known. But just because it was too late to make the best deal didn’t mean it was too late to make some deal. They could have the cash, they could have the car, hell, they could have the house. But that wouldn’t be all Clevenger would insist on. Just as they had killed Augie even after they had gotten the stash beneath the chair, they would surely kill me, too. After all my planning it was ironic that the one thing that wouldn’t be faked would be my death.

Yet, if Clevenger would stop there I’d spit on my hand to seal the deal and consider it all well played. I would have called Clevenger right there and made the offer, but the son of bitch driving behind me had my phone. I’d have to bide my time to make that deal a reality. But would the Old Spice thug even let me make the call? The way he leered when he asked if my wife was a looker gave me all the answer I needed. Whatever happened wouldn’t end with my death.

My God, it might only begin there.

In the car in front of me a woman threw back her head, laughing. How could she laugh, how was such an act possible? A man with a bucket hat powered past me in a convertible. Where could he be going that was so important? That the whole of the world continued to spin on its axis, blandly oblivious, seemed impossible to me. Somewhere tragedy was striking, a tsunami, an earthquake, an invading army of children with machetes.
That’s where I belonged, where everyone felt the despair that was welling in my throat.

Without even knowing how I got there, I was suddenly at the entrance to my development, with its brick wall and lordly cement lions. Patriots Landing, the very anodyne of despair. But not today, not now. I stopped for a moment, not wanting to make the left that would take me home, not wanting to make it all final, when my car lurched suddenly forward.

It took me a moment to realize what had happened. The son of a bitch had rear-ended me.

I had to stop myself from jumping out and checking on the bumper. Did he have any idea what it cost to fix those things? Then I remembered it was his car now. When I looked into the mirror he waved his hand at me, telling me to take the turn. I closed my eyes, felt the car lurch again, along with my stomach. I opened my eyes and drove into my development.

The road in was lined with Carter Braxton models and George Wyeth models, houses that were too mean for my ambitions all those years ago but now looked perfectly lovely, idyllic even. I turned onto a street lined with Peyton Randolph models. What wouldn’t I give to safely call one of those precious homes my own. My own George Washington now seemed flatly grotesque, its ostentatious wings a manifestation of my grandest delusions. As I continued I saw a road to the right lined with Patrick Henrys, Chandler Court, the very road the salesman had tried to sell us on when first we visited Patriots Landing. Sometimes I would drive down it just to feel grateful about my splendiferous George Washington. But I wasn’t feeling so grateful anymore.

Without even being sure of what I was doing, I turned onto Chandler Court and started down its curved way. The houses with their lovely brick fronts passed by as if in a parade. I could have been so happy in one of them, I thought. I’d give anything to be happy in one of them right now. In the rearview mirror I saw Old Spice with a phone to his ear, looking right and left, trying to
catch the numbers, unsure of where he was going. While he was distracted, I pressed the gas pedal and sped forward.

Toward the cul-de-sac at the end of Chandler Court.

It was wide, that cul-de-sac, designed to place a maximum number of homes around its circular edge, since cul-de-sac homes sold at a premium. The cars that were parked were parked in the driveways, leaving me a broad circle in which to make my turn. I zigged left to get the best angle, zagged hard right, banked left again as I whipped around the circle, centrifugal force throwing me and everything else in the car to the right. When my tires slapped back to horizontal I was facing the exact opposite direction, toward the mouth of Chandler Court, heading right for Old Spice in his rental Ford.

His eyes widened when he saw me coming and realized how crazy I might truly be.

I aimed for him head-on, with just enough of an angle that the reinforced corner of my sturdily built German tank would slam into his grille front and center, sending the entire engine, hot and spinning, into his lap. I was closing like a rocket on a string, the space between us tightening with an unimaginable fury, when Old Spice flinched. He thought I was playing chicken. He thought I expected him to turn so I could make my escape, and to save his skin, he did just that, turned to the right, leaving me a gap in which to flee. But he hadn’t lived the last quarter century of my life.

I wasn’t intending to escape; I was there to end a threat to my family’s existence on my own terms. Even if I couldn’t make the call to Clevenger to present my offer, I was going to make the most important part of the deal happen on my own. And by flinching, all Old Spice did was turn the soft side of his car toward the hard corner of my own, like a great whale turning its belly to the harpoon.