The Dismantling (27 page)

He shook his head. He understood, of course, that it had been a mistake to visit Cheryl, but he didn't want to hear about it from Katherine. “She just wants this whole thing to go away. She's not going to say anything about me or about Maria getting any money.”

“You don't know that. And you can't risk it.”

“You mean DaSilva can't risk it.”

Katherine cut him a look. “What are you trying to say?”

They merged onto 278, heading north across the Triborough Bridge. A caravan of snowplows—city garbage trucks outfitted with blades and chains—rolled, hazard lights flashing, in a slow, militaristic column down the middle lane.

“If this is really about me, about keeping me safe, then shouldn't I get a say?” He traced an X into the fogged-up passenger window. “I trust Cheryl and Crewes. I want to stay with Maria.”

“I'm sorry, Simon, but you can't.”

“So it is about DaSilva, then. I'm the connection, the only link between him and everybody else, and now he needs me to get out of the way.” But even as he said it, Simon realized this wasn't true: Maria knew about DaSilva. Maria knew about DaSilva, and yet Peter and Katherine didn't know that she knew. There had to be an advantage for him in that gap.

“It's about both of you.” Katherine stared straight ahead, through the windshield, jaw clenched.

“What about Maria?”

“She stays in Peter's apartment.”

“So she's a prisoner?”

“What? Jesus, Simon. Calm down, okay? She's safest where she is now, in that apartment. If people at Cabrera want to speak with her, it'll be worse for everyone if she's gone missing.”

“I need to talk to her, Katherine.”

“Wait until you get where you're going.”

“Yeah?” Anger welled up inside him, a bilious surge. “Well, where the fuck is that?”

“I don't know. I'm handing you off.”

“Handing me off? To who?”

Katherine sighed again. She seemed suddenly exhausted, less sure of herself. “You understand by now how this kind of thing works. The less each person knows, the better. Break it up into pieces, right?”

“So you're just going to hand me over to some guy because Peter told you to?”

“Yeah, some guy who's going to take you somewhere safe, okay? Some guy who's going to hide you until Peter fixes all this. Some guy who's going to keep you from getting arrested. Get it?”

“Who is he?”

“I told you—I have no idea. Probably some meathead Peter grew up with who wants to earn a few bucks, who knows.”

“I thought you were done with all this,” he said. “I thought you didn't want to be involved anymore.”

“I am and I don't. But this is an emergency and who else could Peter call?”

“Is he paying you?”

“Jesus Christ!” Katherine gripped the steering wheel as though she were about to rip it off.

“Well, is he?”

“It's a favor, Simon. That's it.”

He crossed his arms and stared out the window. Cars crawled along the highway, struggling in the slush. “This is bullshit, Katherine.”

She ignored him and frowned at the ribbons of red taillights stretching out in front of them. “We're gonna be late.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes, Simon listening to the soft swooshing of snow under their tires.

“Listen,” Katherine said, her voice softer now, “I know I got you into all this shit, and I know I have to take some responsibility for that. I liked you, Simon. I still like you. I saw that you were desperate, and I wanted to help. You were different from all the other kids, all these overachieving robots I'm gonna be stuck with for the next three years. They're smart, all of them, we know that, but it's just one kind of intelligence, right? Hypercompetitive book smarts. They're coming straight from college, these kids, and most of them have never experienced shit, nothing real anyway.” She shook her head. “Whatever, I don't need to tell you this, you were there with me. But you weren't like them. There was something different about you. So when you . . . when you had to leave, I just wanted to help you. I didn't think anything like this was going to happen.”

“You didn't make me do anything.”

“Yeah, fine, it was your choice, but I brought the choice to you. Just don't think it's not weighing on me, okay? This is . . . It wasn't supposed to go like this. This last deal Peter put you on . . .” She shook her head again. “He's getting greedy. He pushed it.”

She exited the highway and turned into a nondescript neighborhood of small vinyl-sided houses bound together by thick tangles of electrical and telecommunications wires. Simon had no idea where they were. The Bronx was a closed box to him, as far removed—physically, anyway—from the Rockaways as the borders of the five boroughs would allow. The blowing snow made it difficult to see much beyond the hunched, swaddled houses. Under the streetlamp's pools of orange-sodium light, the parked cars were quickly disappearing, obscured by layers of flakes that stuck like frosting to the cold metal.

“Where's this guy going to take me, Katherine?” he asked.

Katherine slowed down, peering up at the street signs. “You know Peter wouldn't tell me that. A safe house, that's all he said.”

“Yeah, that's what I figured.”

She executed a complicated series of turns, bringing them deeper into a warren of quiet residential streets.

“This near where you grew up?”

“Not too far.” Katherine was distracted, focusing on the route. She made a last turn and then pulled up to one corner of a four-way stop. She turned off her lights and peered across the intersection. “This is it.” She checked the clock. “We actually made up some time there.”

“We're early?”

“Just a few minutes.”

Simon patted his pockets, found his Parliaments. He waved the pack at Katherine and tilted his head questioningly toward the street. She wrinkled her nose and nodded. She hated cigarettes as only a former addict could, and he knew she'd let him smoke in her apartment that one night only out of pity for his disastrous state.

“Come out and talk with me,” he said. “Who knows when I'll see you again, right?”

She nodded again, unfastening her seat belt and stepping out onto the sidewalk with him, leaving the car running. He walked around to the driver's side and stood next to her. His fingers were clumsy from the cold, but he managed to pry a cigarette from the pack and get it lit. He took a few drags in silence, looking around at the nearby houses. Nobody seemed to be watching them. He peered down each of the four streets; a car approached from two blocks down on one of the avenues, some kind of low, long sedan. He prayed this wasn't the man they were waiting for, holding his breath as the car came to a stop at the intersection. The tires crunched to a halt in the salted snow. Simon stared at the car. It seemed to stop for a strangely long time, the seconds ticking by, and then just as Simon was about to ask Katherine if this was the guy, the sedan inched forward into the intersection, its tires spinning for purchase before catching and jerking the car forward, across, and away. Simon watched the taillights disappear around the next corner. He wasn't going to leave Maria behind; he wasn't going to fuck up this time. He took a last drag of his cigarette, tossed it away half-finished, and turned to Katherine.

“Katherine.”

“Yeah?” She turned to him expectantly, half-smiling, her lips a dark slash across her pale face.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

She looked at him in confusion for half a breath, and then he bolted to the car, yanking open the RAV4's door, pushing the gear into drive with the door still open and his body only partway on the seat. Katherine sprung after him, but her feet slipped out from underneath her on the snow-slick sidewalk and she landed heavily on her tailbone, her body meeting the concrete with a wet thump. “Fucking Christ!” She scrambled to her feet, fingers scrabbling at the running board, eyes bugging wide, screaming at him to stop the fucking car. “I'm sorry,” he yelled. “I'm sorry!” He pulled the door shut with one hand, the other steadying the wheel as he coasted across the intersection and then gunned it down the block, toward the smeary blur of a busier street a few hundred yards ahead, as he blew through one stop sign and then another, in the rearview mirror Katherine receding and then finally disappearing, swallowed up by the snow-speckled darkness.

S
IMON
lifted his foot from the accelerator, the RAV4 rattling violently before settling into its new speed. Signs announced the terminus of the Long Island Expressway, and he took Route 24 southeast to the Sunrise Highway, black fields constricting the narrower road. The asphalt scrolled in front of their wheels, overlaid with a writhing veil of snow. He glanced over at Maria. She was still asleep, arms tucked inside her sweater, hands lightly cradling her stomach. Her head rested against the window, her breath fogging the glass.

He'd called her while he retraced Katherine's route back to Roosevelt Island, his frozen fingers fumbling with his cell phone, and told her to pack her bag, to throw some of his clothes and his laptop into a duffel as well.

“What?” Her voice was sluggish, as though she'd been sleeping. “Where are we going?”

“Away from the city.”

“Where?”

“I don't know.” He had a vague notion of heading east, far out onto the island. “The ocean. Montauk.”

“I don't understand. What's happened?”

“Please, just get ready.” He glanced at Katherine's cell phone rattling around in one of the cup holders: this was a piece of good luck, but she'd figure out a way to contact DaSilva soon enough. “We'll talk in the car.” He passed another battalion of plows, grinding along like tanks in the opposite direction. “One more thing.”

“Yeah?”

“In my bedroom, on the floor of the closet, there's a lockbox. Can you bring that for me too?”

“Yeah, fine.” She paused. “Simon, what the fuck is this?”

“Just trust me. Please.”

She'd been waiting in the lobby when he pulled up, the RAV4 a little squirrely in the snow, threatening to fishtail as he steered to the end of Main Street. She threw the bags into the back, and then they were off again, heading east into Queens, onto the Grand Central and then the LIE. He told her what had happened with Katherine, and she'd listened in silence, absentmindedly rubbing her stomach and staring out the window as he spoke.

“You're lucky you got away,” she said once he was finished.

“I hated ripping Katherine off, it's not her fault. But I couldn't leave you behind like that. And what—I was just going to be a prisoner somewhere until DaSilva decided to set me loose?”

Maria turned to him, surprised. “Prisoner? You believed that story?”

“What do you mean?”

“Simon, that guy she was going to leave you with? You think he was going to set you up in some cabin in the fucking woods somewhere? Like a witness protection program or some shit? No. He was going to kill you or take you to somebody else who'd do it for him.”

“What are you talking about?” He almost laughed, the idea was so absurd, as though the specter of professional murder could just wander into his life from a mob movie or paperback thriller.

“I'm serious. Think about it.”

“Katherine would never do that to me.”

“She probably didn't know. DaSilva sent her because he thinks you trust her. And I bet she believed whatever DaSilva told her.”

“But clearly you don't.”

“Not a fucking chance. You're the only person the clients ever saw or talked to, right? So get rid of you, and then all he needs to worry about is that hospital investigation. Nobody can connect him to Health Solutions.”

“Except Katherine. She worked with some of the older clients, back before I started.”

She shrugged. “Yeah, and who knows what he's got planned for her.”

“Still, Maria . . . Murder? Come on.”

She shrugged again. “It's what I would do if I were him.”

He glanced over at her. She was staring out the window, hunched in her black leather jacket, a black scarf wound around her neck. He couldn't tell if she was joking.

“So, what are we doing?” she said.

“We're driving to Montauk. I told you.”

“Simon. We can't just run. There's no end to that.”

“What do you want to do? You want to stay in that apartment and wait for him? You think he wants me dead—that's what you just told me, right? Even if I think you're crazy—which makes waiting around sound like a pretty terrible idea.”

She curled into her seat, tucking her head into her shoulder. “You're right about that much.”

She shut herself down then, closing her eyes and pulling the scarf over her face, her breath deepening as she fell asleep. Simon stared into the pointillistic swirls of snow rushing over the windshield. He remembered the first and only time he'd been to the East End before, back in high school. It had been Ray Kippler's idea: a surfing contest. Kippler had heard about a circuit of amateur events on Long Island—Lido, Gilgo, Tobay, all the way east to Montauk, where the final contest of the summer and fall season was taking place. At that point, Ray was still just a guy Simon surfed with sometimes, not yet Amelia's boyfriend, although his crush on her was already obvious to Simon and, presumably, to Amelia as well.

Michael drove the three of them out to the contest site, a secluded wedge of beach tucked into a crease in Montauk's dun-colored bluffs. They'd found the ocean in chaos, waves running east to west across the rock reef, breaking at cockeyed angles. Simon had been overpowered by the raw swell, flaming out in the first round, while hours later Kippler lost in the finals to a lanky semipro kid from Babylon. Sometime during the blustery afternoon, Michael had driven back into town, to seek refuge at a bar; Simon hitched a ride and found him in the bar's parking lot, after dark, stretched across the backseat of the family car, head wedged awkwardly into the crook between seat and door, his mouth slack, a white crust smeared across one corner. The four of them ended up spending the night in a motel off the Sunrise Highway after Michael declared he wasn't interested in dealing with the drive home. Simon remembered the fury in his sister's eyes, fury at the embarrassment that was their father. Simon had found it difficult to summon the same immediate anger; he simply added Michael's behavior to the long list of grievances he nurtured, more water on the sickly plant of his resentment. He remembered returning from the trip more worried about Amelia and Ray than about his father.

Now, seven years later, he drove the same route he'd just traveled in his memory, stretches of dark road punctuated by clusters of one-story commercial buildings and then, every few miles, the towns themselves, their Main Streets even more picturesque in the snow, sidewalks pristine white carpets, streetlamps glowing softly like crystal balls. To Simon, the whole place still looked unreal, like the model town stuffed inside a snow globe.

“I've never seen this before.”

He glanced over at Maria. Her eyes were open, sleepily regarding the depthless swarm of flakes rushing over the windshield. “The snow?

“Yeah,” she said. “It's. . . . rawer than I imagined. Wilder.” She sat up and stretched. “Where are we?”

“I'm not sure. Bridgehampton, maybe.”

“You know your way around out here?”

“A little bit,” he said. “I surfed near here once. It's been a long time though.”

They spotted an open motel on the far side of Montauk, a mile past the edge of town. A single car, a Toyota pickup with a fishing-rod rack, was parked in the lot. The motel was a long, low building with two floors of rooms, their doors painted sky-blue. A small freestanding structure stood off to the side, its window glowing, “Office” stenciled onto the glass.

Simon pulled into the lot and turned off the RAV4's engine. They sat in the lingering heat. The silence was sudden, shocking. Simon's tensed shoulders fired off flares of pain as the adrenaline finally drained from his muscles. A tiredness verging on catatonia threatened to subsume him. He roused himself, afraid if he didn't move now he'd fall asleep right where he was.

They gathered their bags and trudged through ankle-deep snow to the office, which was empty, a functioning space heater the only evidence that anybody might be nearby. Maria rang a silver bell on the counter. Nothing happened. She rang it again, and finally a door behind the counter opened, a teenage boy materializing, reddish patches of dry skin flaking on his cheeks and forehead, the whites of his eyes vermillion tinted. He blinked, as though their appearance in the office might be a glitch of his stoned brain.

“Help you?” he finally said.

“We'd like a room, please,” Maria said.

His eyes meandered over to Simon's face and then back to Maria. “How many nights?”

Maria glanced at Simon. “We're not sure. Does it matter?”

The kid shrugged. He consulted a weathered ledger filled with cryptic, crabbed glyphs and fussed underneath the desk before producing a key. “Room 12. They're all the same, so . . .” He put the key on the counter, then told them the rate, which was far more expensive than the place's appearance suggested.

“That's fine,” Maria said.

“Solid. I just need a credit card.”

“We're paying cash.”

“Uh, so we need a credit card for check-in? As, like, a deposit.”

“Here.” Maria withdrew a wad of twenties from her pocket and placed it on the counter. “All right?”

The kid eyed the money as though it might disappear if he looked straight at it. “Um.”

“That's enough for two nights,” she said. “If we only stay one, you can keep it all anyway. You get me?”

A mercenary gleam flickered behind the kid's glazed eyes. “That's not our policy, but . . . maybe if you make it three nights . . .”

“I don't think so.” Maria took the key off the counter and nudged the cash. “Recognize a good deal when it's right in front you.”

He shrugged and quickly scooped up the bills. “You folks have a nice night,” he said, already retreating behind the private door.

Room 12 was at the end of the second floor, farthest from the office. Maria unlocked its door, revealing a boxy space done in a chintzy maritime style, an oar fixed onto the wall above the television, a gloomy oil painting, of what appeared to be a capsized whaling ship, over the bed. She shut the door behind them, hooking the lock chain into place. She turned and saw Simon sitting on the bed, watching her.

“What?” she said.

“We made it. That's all.”

“For tonight.”

He nodded. “For tonight.”

He took off his shoes and jeans, throwing them into a heap on the floor, and climbed under the blankets. There'd been no discussion of splitting up or finding a room with two beds. He closed his eyes, listening to Maria move around the room from what seemed like a great distance, then feeling the mattress shift as she climbed into the bed beside him, her body warm without touching his back. He saw, coalescing out of the black behind his eyelids, Katherine's face, her mouth a perfect O of surprise as she tumbled down onto the icy pavement. She must have already told DaSilva about his escape; he wondered how violently Peter had reacted, whether he'd taken his anger out on her. DaSilva wasn't just going to let them go—Simon understood that much. He'd be looking for them—probably he already was—and Simon thought he might finally learn the real nature of DaSilva's criminal self: a thug or just a hustler, a simple con man or an honest-to-God killer?

 • • • 

S
IMON
snapped awake from a dream of drowning. He'd been thrashing through the ocean at night, his limbs tangling with those of other unseen swimmers, the cold water roiling with dozens of struggling bodies. He'd tried with all his strength to push toward shore, but something underwater held on to his ankle, an icy hand that would not relinquish its grip, pulling him down under the surface of the waves. He fought to keep his head above water, but he wasn't strong enough, and as he opened his mouth to scream, the frigid salt water poured in, and—

He woke up, his mouth open wide, taking in huge, desperate gulps of air.

The motel room was dark and warm, womb-like. As he lay there on his back, heart kicking and eyes open, shapes became objects: desk; chair; television. He could hear the ocean on the far side of the marsh behind the motel. He turned his head to the window: dawn's gray glow framed the blinds. He felt shaky, panicky. Just because a bad dream was simple to understand—was almost idiotic in its literal-mindedness: Amelia, always Amelia—didn't make the experience of it any less terrifying. He looked to his other side, and the dark shape next to him resolved into Maria's body, covered by the sheets, and above, her bare neck, the curve of her shoulders. Her face floated within the dark mass of her hair, like a reflection of the moon on water.

She yawned, rolled onto her back, and rubbed at her eyes. She looked over at him.

“How long have you been awake?”

He shrugged. “Not that long.”

“Thinking?”

“Too much.”

She sat up against the headboard. “Why'd you pick this place, Simon?”