They left Caleb’s smashed-up SUV in the woods and drove the Range Rover three hundred miles south to Woonsocket, Rhode Island, just south of the Massachusetts border and about fifteen miles north of Providence. They’d had a lot of time to talk on the drive but hadn’t really, except about the essentials. They’d listened to the radio long enough to hear they were both considered “persons of interest” in the deaths of two people in two different states. Police in Providence and Boston were tight-lipped as to why they believed the murder of a small-town bank employee in Providence was connected to the murder of a businessman in Boston, but they were determined to meet with Brian Alden, the brother of the Providence victim and business partner of the Boston victim, and with Brian Alden’s wife, Rachel Childs-Delacroix. Handguns registered to both “persons of interest” had not been recovered at their Back Bay home, so they were to be considered armed.
“Basically my life is ruined,” Rachel said somewhere near Lewiston, Maine. “Even if I could clear my name.”
“Big if,” Brian said.
“I’d fuck myself financially to do it.”
“Spend a lot of time in jail while that was happening.”
She shot him a dirty look he didn’t see because his eyes were on the road. “And they could still bury me deep on ancillary charges.”
He nodded. “Obstruction of justice comes to mind. Cops tend to get a bit miffed when you forget to tell them there’s a corpse sitting at your dining room table. Leaving the scene of a crime, unlawful flight, reckless driving, I’m sure I’ll think of a few more.”
“This isn’t funny,” she said.
He looked over at her. “When did I give the impression it was?”
“Right now. You’re being sarcastic, snarky.”
“I get that way when I’m terrified.”
“You’re terrified? You.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Beyond terrified. If no one’s found the safe house and we can do what we need to do there and if we can slip into Providence without being made, and if we can get into the bank and get to the safe deposit box where I stashed the passports and the running money, if we can still get back out of that bank and out of Providence and grab Haya and the baby and find an airport where no one’s looking for us and our faces aren’t plastered over everyone’s home screen and the nine TVs tuned to CNN in the airport bar, and if they don’t have someone waiting for us in Amsterdam, then, yes, we could possibly survive the year. But I’d put our odds at successfully navigating all those obstacles at, oh, I dunno, grim to none.”
“Amsterdam,” she said. “I thought the bank was in the Caymans.”
“It is, but they’ll definitely be waiting for us there. If we get to Amsterdam, we can wire it all to Switzerland.”
“But why stop in Amsterdam?”
He shrugged. “I’ve always liked Amsterdam. You’d like it too. The old canals are pretty. Lotta bikes, though.”
“You talk like you’re taking me sightseeing.”
“Well, that’s the plan, isn’t it?”
“We’re not together,” she said.
“No?”
“No, you lying sack of shit. This is a business arrangement from here on out.”
He rolled down his window for a moment, took a blast on his face to wake himself up. Rolled the window back up.
“Okay,” he said, “you play the business tip. But I’m in love with you.”
“You don’t know the first thing about love.”
“Guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on that one.”
“Did you ever search for my father?”
“What?”
“When I met you, you were a private investigator.”
“That was a scam. My first one, actually.”
“So you were never an actual private investigator?”
He shook his head. “I set up that front to do background checks for all the employees of a tech start-up that was setting up shop in the area.”
“Why would you set up a front just to do background checks?”
“There were sixty-four employees of that company, if memory serves. Sixty-four DOBs, sixty-four SSNs, sixty-four histories.”
“You stole sixty-four identities.”
He nodded. It was a quick nod but full of pride. “One of them’s on your passport.”
“But when I came through your office door?”
“I tried to talk you out of hiring me.”
“But when I came back a few months later, you just took my money and—”
“I looked for your father, Rachel. I busted my ass on it. I wish I’d been smart enough to consider that James was his last name, but I wasn’t. But I ID’d every professor with the first name James who’d taught in that region over the previous twenty years, just like I said I did. The only honest work I ever did as a private eye, I did for you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re good.”
“I’m what?”
“You’re good. You’re one of the only good people I’ve ever met. And you’re worth fighting for and fighting with. You’re worth everything.”
“You’re such a liar. You’re running a fucking con right now. On me.”
He thought about that. Eventually he said, “When I met you in the bar that night, Caleb and Nicole kept telling me to get rid of you. Grifters can’t have love lives, they said, just sex lives. This from my sister who would end up getting knocked up by a married guy. She’s giving me advice on love. And Caleb, who would marry a woman who couldn’t speak English. Those are my Dear Abbys.” He shook his head. “‘Don’t fall in love.’ Well, that worked out fucking great for all of us.”
She willed herself not to look over at him but instead out the window.
“I fell for you because that’s what you do when you meet the woman whose face you want to be looking into when you die. You fall. And keep falling. And if you’re really lucky, she falls with you and you never get back up again to where you were because if that was so great, you wouldn’t have needed to fall in the first place. But when I fell, I fell all the way. I had just started this con. I met you the night I closed papers on the mine. Caleb was supposed to meet me at the bar to celebrate, but I saw you and I texted him and told him I’d eaten bad tuna at lunch, and he went out to dinner somewhere by himself. And I looked across the bar and I thought, ‘That’s Rachel Childs. I tried to find her father once. I used to watch her on the news.’ I used to wonder who was lucky enough to go home to you. And then that drunk fucked with you and I got to come to your rescue and the irony is, you thought it might be a con. I always loved that. Made me believe in God for a minute. And you left and I ran out onto the streets looking for you.” He looked across at her. “I found you. And then we had the walk and the blackout and found our amazing bar.”
“What was playing when we entered?”
“Tom Waits.”
“What song?”
“‘Long Way Home.’”