“Should have been ‘16 Shells from a Thirty-Ought-Six.’”
“Be nice.” He shifted in his seat, resettled his wrist against the top of the wheel. “You might not like my methods, Rachel, and it may be unwelcome news to learn I make my living running long cons. So you can fall out of love with me, but I can’t fall out of love with you. I wouldn’t know how.”
She almost bought it, if only for a second, but then she remembered who this man was—an actor, a con man, a grifter, a professional liar.
“People who love each other,” she said, “don’t wreck each other’s lives.”
He chuckled softly. “Sure they do. That’s what love is—where once there was one, now there’s two, and that’s so much less convenient and less orderly and less safe. You want me to apologize for blowing your life up? Okay. I’m sorry. But what did I blow up? Your mother’s dead, you never knew your father, your friends are transitory at best, and you never leave the apartment. What life did I take, Rachel?”
What life indeed, she wondered, as they entered Woonsocket at sundown.
It was a faded, cauterized mill town with hopeful pockets of gentrification that couldn’t compensate for the air of abandonment. The main street was peppered with vacant storefronts. Some mills rose up behind those buildings, their windows broken or nonexistent, the brick edifices festooned with graffiti, the land reclaiming the lower floors and punching cracks through the foundations. It had happened before she was born, this wholesale discarding of American industry, this switch from a culture that made things of value to a culture that consumed things of dubious merit. She’d grown up in the absence, in other people’s memory of a dream so fragile it had probably been doomed from the moment of conception. If there had ever been a social contract between the country and its citizens, it was long gone now, save the Hobbesian agreement that had been in play since our ancestors had first stumbled from caves in search of food: Once I get mine, you’re on your own.
Brian drove over a series of dark hilly streets and then down to a quartet of long, four-story buildings that comprised a failed mill sitting along the river with nothing else around it for blocks. Each brick building had at least a hundred windows fronting the street and the same amount again on the river side. The high window frames in the center of the buildings were twice as large as the others. Brian drove around the complex to reveal a pair of covered passageways between the fourth floors connecting the buildings, so that the complex, if seen from the air, would look like a double H.
“This is your safe house?” she said.
“No, this is an abandoned mill.”
“So where’s the safe house?”
“Nearby.”
They rolled past broken windows and weeds the height of the Range Rover. Gravel and rocks and pebbles of broken glass crunched under his tires.
He took out his phone and fired off a text to someone. A few seconds later it vibrated with the return text. He put the phone back in his jacket. He drove around the mill twice more. At the tip of the property, he killed the headlights and rolled up a small knoll, just upriver from a dam by the sound of it. At the top of the knoll, partially obscured by a stand of half-dead trees, stood a small brick two-story house with a black mansard roof. He put the Rover in park but left the engine running and they sat and watched the house.
“Used to be the night watchman’s. City’s owned all this land ever since the mill went tits-up in the seventies. Most of the land is probably poisoned and no one has the money to test it, so they sold us this house for pennies on the dollar.” He shifted in his seat. “It’s got good bones, actually, and clear sight lines. Impossible to approach without being seen.”
“Who’d you text?” she asked.
“Haya.” He nodded at the house. “She’s inside with Annabelle. Wanted her to know I was coming.”
“So why aren’t we going in?”
“We will.”
“What’re we waiting for?”
“For my sense of terror to be overridden by my impatience.” He looked up at the house. A light came from somewhere deep in the back of it. “If all was clear, Haya was supposed to text ‘I am OK. Come in.’”
“And?”
“She only texted the first half.”
“Well, it’s not her native tongue. And she’s scared.”
He chewed on the inside of his mouth for a moment. “We can’t tell her about Caleb.”
“We have to.”
“If she thinks he’s just held up and will meet us in Amsterdam in a couple days, she’ll keep her shit together. But if she doesn’t?” He turned in the seat, touched her hand. She pulled it back. “We can’t tell her. Rachel, Rachel.”
“What?”
“If this goes south, they will kill us all. The baby too.”
She stared through the dark Range Rover at him.
“We can’t give her any reason to be any more unpredictable than she’s liable to be already. We tell her in Amsterdam.”
She nodded.
“I need to hear you say it.”
“We tell her in Amsterdam.”
Brian looked at her for a long time before he said, “You still got your gun?”
“Yup.”
He reached under the seat and came back with a 9mm Glock, put it behind his back.
“You’ve had a gun the whole time,” she said.
“Shit, Rachel,” he said with a distracted sigh, “I’ve got three.”
They walked around the outside of the house twice in the dark before Brian led them up the sagging back steps to a door that had lost most of its paint over the years. The floorboards squeaked underfoot and the house itself creaked in an unseasonably cool wind, more early autumn than early summer.
He moved along the porch, checked all the windows and the front door before they returned to the back. He unlocked the door and they entered.
An alarm beeped to their left and Brian punched in her birthdate on the keypad and the beeping stopped.
The central hallway ran straight from the back door, past an oak staircase to the front door. The house smelled clean but dusty, maybe a light foundational odor of mildew that a thousand housecleanings could probably never remove. He produced two penlights from his jacket, handed her one, and turned on his own.
Haya sat below the mail slot in the front door, junk mail off to her right, a gun clasped in her hands.
Brian gave her a wave and a warm smile and came down the hall to her. She lowered her gun and he hugged her awkwardly and then they stood in front of her.
“Baby is asleep.” She pointed at the ceiling.
“You need sleep,” Brian said. “You look exhausted.”
“Where is Caleb?”
“The bad men, Haya, they may be following him. He didn’t want to lead them here. To you and Annabelle. You understand?”
Her breath was coming too fast. She bit her upper lip so hard Rachel feared it would spout blood. “He is . . . alive?”