Steve says, “Not to worry. It’s done.”
I’m on my back in the shed. Smelling fertilizer. My head resting against the metal prongs of a rake, hips and shoulders hurting as if I’d been dropped from a height in this exact position. Pain behind my eyes that’s almost worse than seeing what I saw.
Almost.
“You’re going to handle this?”
Steve says, “We’ve been doing business for a long time. I’ll do what has to be done. It’s taken care of. Go!”
“You’re sure? It’s your kid.”
Steve says, “It’s not my kid. It never was my kid. Go! Maybe she was cute when she was eight, but she turned herself into a useless whore. Some mornings, I can’t stand to look at her. Believe me, it’s nothing.”
I’m the it.
The it that’s not his kid.
The it that’s done, the useless whore, the it that’s taken care of.
The it that has to be killed.
“She’s out cold. I’ll walk you to your car.”
The voices fade into the wind.
I tell him I know what Steve does for a living. I do.
I file things for him in the home office.
I’m not an idiot. I know he does taxes for people named Yeager. People who do a whole lot of business in Colombia. People who, when you google them, you figure out they didn’t actually make that much money importing extra virgin olive oil and exporting scrap metal because there isn’t that much olive oil or scrap metal on earth.
But I thought he loved me.
I thought I was his little girl. Like his daughter. His kid.
I thought he’d do anything for me.
Not to me.
I say how I rolled onto my side in the shed, crouched, stood, squeezed out under the board loosened by years of hide-and-seek, and took off along the shore.
Hid in a tree house.
Climbed onto a truck.
62
Jack
I thought things were bad, but they’re worse than I thought. I was supposed to kill a witness—not a killer, but the witness to the killing. She knows squat about Karl Yeager’s business.
Does Don know? “She might know things,” he said. Yes, he knew, and yes, I’m stupid. Don winds me up, gets to me with some story about Karl Yeager—whose name is enough to make people shit their pants—and once he’s got me good and scared, he sends me off to kill an innocent as ordered by Esteban Mendes, a stepfather who eats his young. And being Don, he throws our mom into the mix for good measure. Or Mendes does.
For Nicolette, it’s even worse. Her dad is gunning for her? Her dad is the top of a pyramid, and Don’s in the ooze at the bottom, calling the shots for his dupe brother: me. I am the murder technician for Esteban Mendes.
“Why didn’t you walk into a police station?”
She says, “Why didn’t you?”
“The truth—because if Karl Yeager says your family is dead if you don’t do him a favor . . . Come on, you looked him up. . . .”
The truth is, I rejected the possibility of telling the FBI, the Nevada police, and the fire department that didn’t investigate obvious arson at the outset. Telling didn’t figure into the equation when Don was handing me my marching orders, or when I was driving home, or when my house had smoke pouring out of it, my mother regaling me with the fairy tale about the spontaneous combustion of smoke detector batteries.
Telling anyone was too risky, too messy, too counterproductive, a death sentence . . . for me, not for Nicolette.
No, I went off to solve the fucking problem, to find Nicolette. And if the whole point was to warn her, why didn’t I?
Because I’m Jack Manx.
The truth is tearing at me like a detonated land mine. I’m the guy who didn’t consider the normal possibilities because the normal course of action wasn’t even a road in my twisted yellow wood. And this, Mr. Berger, proves that taking the much less traveled road can be a bad thing.
I say, “They would have believed you.”
She kicks the back of my seat. “Blame me, why don’t you?”
Turns out, there are five police officers in Cotter’s Mill, Ohio, and four of them shoot geese with Mendes—geese, and maybe sitting ducks.
My dad avoided police, crossed the street, drove in the other direction. But Cotter’s Mill is a backwater town in Ohio, and if she believes Mendes owns the police department, what do I know? You could fill Lake Tahoe with the nothing I know. They might not hurt a kid outright, but how normal would it be for police to return a runaway girl to her dear old dad? Ignore her wild stories? Scoop her into the squad car and drop her off at home?
“Is that good enough?” she spits at me from the backseat. “Because maybe it was binge watching In Plain Sight on TV, where every single protected witness gets shot at. Maybe telling the police my fingerprints were on the knife because someone else put them there seemed like a bad idea.”
“Baby—”
“I’m not your baby, J. Jack. Whoever.”
“Do you want to come in the front seat?”