No Safe House (16 page)

“What are you doing here, Jane?” I asked her.

“It’s Vince,” Jane said. “He wants to have a word with you.”

VINCE
Fleming wanted to talk to me? Now? At this time of night? What the hell sense did that make? I hadn’t spoken to the man in seven years, not since that second visit to the hospital. Why would he want anything to do with me now?

Unless.

Had I just been prowling around Vince Fleming’s house? So far as I knew, he still lived on East Broadway, his place on the beach.

“Tell me this isn’t Vince’s house,” I said to Jane. The idea that I might have burgled that man’s home made my insides flip.

She shook her head. “No.”

“Well, thank Christ for that. If this isn’t his house, then I don’t know what he wants with me. Grace and I have to go.”

I wanted to get my daughter into the car and head straight to Milford Hospital to see whether Stuart Koch had been admitted. And depending on what we learned there, I might very well be looking for a lawyer for my daughter before the sun came up. Someone had lost some blood in that house, and the sooner we
found whose it was, and how it had been spilled, the better chance we had of coming to grips with this mess. It was hard to get someone out of trouble when you didn’t know just how bad the trouble was.

“How the hell did you even know we’re here?” I asked my former student.

Jane’s eyes shifted to Grace.

“I called her,” Grace said. “A while ago. Before I called you to come pick me up.”

Grace had called Jane? Since when did Grace have Jane’s contact information? Since when did Grace even know Jane?

“What?” I asked my daughter. “Why would you call her?”

Grace said something so quietly I couldn’t make it out.

“What?” I said.

“Because she’s a friend,” Grace said. “Because I thought she could help me.”

Jane said, “I told her the person to call was you, not me.”

“What did you find?” Grace asked me. “In the house. Did you find anything?”

“Excuse me,” I said to Jane, then led Grace a few feet away so I could speak to her privately.

“I found some blood,” I told her.

“Oh God.”

“A small amount, in the kitchen. I searched everywhere else and didn’t find anything or anyone. But something happened in there. We’ll go by the hospital, see if Stuart went to the emergency room, and if that doesn’t pan out, we’ll—”

“Mr. Archer.” It was Jane. She’d never called me by my first name. It was always Mr. Archer or Teach.

“We’re talking,” I said.

“Vince really hates to be kept waiting,” she said. “Whatever you’re talking about, trust me, it’s more important that you talk to Vince.”

“I’m not getting this, Jane. What’s this got to do with him?”

She shook her head, raised her right shoulder half an inch like she was too weary for a full shrug. I remembered the gesture from when she sat in my class.

“You know I don’t get involved in his business. He does his thing and I do mine. The less I know about it, the better. It’s not like he calls on me to help him, but he figured, in this case, it might be better if I approached you. And he’s kind of got a lot on his plate at the moment.”

I looked back at the house. “This—this house—has something to do with Vince.”

Jane gave no indication either way. “Like I said, you’re going to have to find out from him.” She hesitated. “He’s gonna want to talk to Grace, too.”

“Not a chance,” I said.

“I told him you’d say that. So I made him a deal, which I’ll make with you. Grace can hang with me while he talks to you. That okay?”

I couldn’t stand there and debate this all night with her. If I refused, Vince would send some of his goons after me the way he had once before, long ago.

“Fine,” I said.

The three of us walked down the driveway to the street. Half a block up, I saw Jane’s Mini parked under a streetlight.

“Come on,” Jane said to Grace.

“Hang on,” I said. “The house on the beach?”

“Yeah,” Jane said. “Where you first had the pleasure. Remember?”

Would have been hard to forget.

IT
took less than ten minutes to get there. I’d driven along here many times in the last seven years, and not because I wanted to remind myself of my encounter with Vince Fleming. East Broadway
was simply a Milford street I often used to get from one part of town to the other. It was also one of my favorite areas, this strip along the beach that looked out onto Long Island Sound and Charles Island, which was officially part of the Silver Sands park. Rumor had it that Captain Kidd had buried a treasure there hundreds of years ago, and I was betting if anyone had found it, it was Vince.

This wasn’t quite the idyllic part of town it was two years earlier, before Hurricane Sandy swept through, laying waste to many of these beach houses, dropping trees, devastating countless home owners and their families, dumping tons of sand hundreds of feet inland.

We’d gotten off relatively easy at our house. We had a tree come down in the yard, one window blew in, and some shingles were ripped off the roof, but it was nothing to complain about compared with the destruction so many of our neighbors endured.

East Broadway was coming back. The street had been lined with contractors’ trucks for more than twenty months. Not all homes could be repaired. The storm leveled many, knocked others off their foundations. Some houses that looked relatively unscathed still had to be torn down because they were structurally unsound.

Vince’s place fell into the repairable category. I walked down here several times in the days after Sandy came through—cars weren’t allowed as crews worked to clear the streets of sand and debris. Part of the roof was missing from Vince’s two-story residence, windows had shattered, some of the siding had been ripped off. But compared with the houses on either side of him, he’d been lucky. Those two places looked as though they’d been dynamited.

Jane drove ahead of me, thinking maybe I couldn’t find the place without help. Her brake lights flashed and I could see her
pointing to the house, Grace barely visible in the passenger seat. She brought the Mini to a stop and I parked behind her.

As I walked up to the passenger side, Grace put down her window. “If you have any kind of problem or you hear anything about Stuart,” I said to her, “you call me, okay?”

She nodded.

The lower level of Vince’s place was mostly garage. A place for two cars, or boat storage. A set of stairs went up the left side of the house to a small landing. Looking up, I could see lights on. I mounted the stairs. Not too slow, but not too fast, either. I figured Vince would be listening for me, and I didn’t want to go charging up there like I was some dog who came whenever you whistled for it. You try to preserve your pride in whatever small ways that are available to you.

I reached the landing and rapped on the screen door.

“ ’S’open,” he said.

It had been a long time since I’d heard that voice. Still recognizable, but more gravelly. Maybe even less forceful. But I knew better than to estimate this man based on his vocal abilities.

I pulled open the door and stepped in. The living area was on the beach side, the kitchen at the back. I glanced out at the sound, but there wasn’t much you could see this time of night beyond a few stars and the faint lights of some boats out on the water.

The room hadn’t changed any since I’d been brought here by Vince’s henchmen seven years ago. Kidnapped, really. I’d been asking around town for him, thinking he might be able to help me find Cynthia, who, along with Grace, was missing at the time, and when he got wind that someone was snooping around looking for him, he had his employees scoop me up and deliver me to him.

At least, this time I’d come under my own power.

He was sitting at the kitchen table, putting down a cell phone, making no effort to get up and greet me. He’d lost some weight
and his hair was peppered with more gray. The word that came to mind was “gaunt.” I wondered whether he was sick.

He pointed to the chair opposite him.

“Siddown, Terry.”

I walked over, pulled out the chair, and sat. I kept my hands in my lap, off the tabletop. Didn’t want Vince to play any knife games with me this time.

“Vince,” I said, nodding.

“Long time,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“You don’t call, you don’t write.”

“Last time I saw you, you didn’t exactly encourage it.”

He waved a hand in the air. “I was feeling kind of cranky. Getting shot will do that to you.”

“I suppose,” I said. “We tried to tell you then, and I mean it when I tell you now, Cynthia and I remain grateful to you for your help and we regret the price you had to pay in offering it.” Vince stared at me. “That’s nice. That’s lovely. The truth is, I think about you most every day.”

I swallowed. “Really.”

“That’s right. Every time I empty my bag.”

I blinked. “I’m sorry. What?”

Vince placed his meaty palms on the table and pushed himself back in his chair. He came around the end of the table, stood about two feet from me. I started to get up, but he raised a hand. “No no, just sit. You’ll get a better view from there.”

He undid his belt, lowered his zipper, pushed his pants down about six inches, and lifted up his shirt to reveal a plastic bag attached to his abdomen. The lower half contained dark yellow liquid.

“You know what that is?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“That’s good. I’m impressed. Before I got shot, I’d never even
heard about these ostomy bag things. But the bullet fucked up my interior plumbing so I can’t piss out my dick anymore. Had to get used to wearing one of these twenty-four/seven. So now, every time I go into the can to drain this bag, I think of you.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

“It’s not the sort of thing you put on Facebook.”

I hadn’t given up trying to be nice. “And I’m sorry about your wife, too. I ran into Jane a while back and she told me.”

Vince tucked his shirt back in, did up his zipper, and buckled his belt. He sat back down across from me.

“You didn’t ask Jane to get me here so you could update me on your health,” I said.

“No,” he said. “It’s about your kid.”

I felt a shiver run down the length of my spine.

“What about my kid?” I asked slowly.

“She’s stepped in the shit, that’s what.”

BERT
Gooding was running the Buick’s headlights off the battery. He wasn’t too worried about anyone noticing the lights out here in the country on a farm, but thought leaving the engine running might attract some attention. It was a big V-8, sounded like a tractor, and pumped out exhaust like a coal plant.

But he needed to see what he was doing. So he positioned the car just right.

He’d brought an ax along, given the kind of job it was, and a change of clothes. It was hard to do something like this and not make a mess of yourself. When he was a kid, his dad used to take him twice a year to a cabin up in Maine, where they had a woodstove, and Bert always volunteered to split the already cut firewood into smaller pieces. He loved the feeling that came from making a perfect swing, blade meeting wood, forcing its way through cleanly without getting stuck. That satisfying sound of cracking wood. Using sufficient force so that you didn’t have to hold the wood down with your boot to pry the blade free. It was all physics.

Not quite the same as what he was doing now. But the principle remained the same. You wanted to take a good, strong swing, connect in just the right place, make as clean a cut as possible. But there wasn’t much chance of getting your blade stuck, and the sound wasn’t nearly as satisfying.

Sickening was more like it.

Didn’t feel good about this. Didn’t feel good about this at all. But sometimes you just had to do what you had to do, at least so long as you were still working for Vince Fleming.

He raised the ax over his head, swung down hard in a perfect arc.

Smoosh
.

Moved over about a foot, swung again.

Smoosh
.

It wasn’t quiet out here, not even with the car turned off. He was right up against the pen where the pigs were kept, and all the commotion had awakened them. They were grunting and snorting and bumping up against one another against the fence. They knew a treat was coming.

Bert tossed some morsels into the pen.

“Eat that, you fat fucks,” he said.

He had the ax up over his head, was getting ready to put some momentum into it, when his phone rang.

“Shit,” he said. Threw him off. He brought the ax down to his side, leaned the handle up against the front bumper of the Buick. He fetched the phone from his pocket, getting some blood on the screen, but not enough that he couldn’t see where the call was coming from:
HOME
.

Jabba.

He put the phone to his ear. “Yes, Janine?”

“Where are you?”

“Work.”

“Do you know what time it is?” she asked.

“I’ve got a pretty good idea.”

“You said you were going to be back by ten. You had a short thing with Vince and you’d be back.”

“Something came up,” Bert said.

“You’ve forgotten, haven’t you?” she snapped.

“Forgotten what?”

“The meeting? At ten? At the home?”

How could he forget? She’d been reminding him about it all week. They’d moved Janine’s eighty-year-old mother, Brenda, out of her apartment and into a seniors home in Orange a month before, but it wasn’t working out. Brenda was making everyone’s life hell. Hated the food, dumped it on the dining room floor in protest. Accused staff of stealing from her even though she couldn’t tell them what was missing. Cheated at cards with the other “inmates,” as she called them. Pushed people in wheelchairs out of her way so she could get on the elevator first.

The managers of the home had compiled a list of grievances about her, and now they wanted her out.

Janine said there was no way her mother could return to her apartment, so she’d just have to move in with Bert and her.