“I know you’re there,” he said. “Zoey. Come out.”
I stepped into the light, my hand gripping the gun in my pocket. He turned to me, but he was wearing a mask, a monstrous grinning blue face, mouth full of fangs, red-eyed skulls for hair, eyes black holes. The Tibetan mask for the sorcerer’s dance. It was a guardian’s mask, a protector against evil. I knew it well. No.
He put the rest of the money in the bag, unhurried as if we had all the time in the world. He pulled the zipper. I saw there was a stack left out, sitting at the corner of the table.
That’s when another form stepped out of the darkness. He wore a mask as well, the face of a gray wolf with a wide nose and deep-set eyes, yellow bared teeth. He stared at me a moment, and I slowed my breathing, hoping my heart rate would follow. But then he looked away, started dragging Rhett Beckham’s body toward the center of the tarp.
I thought about Josh Beckham. Would he mourn his brother? Would there simply be relief? In my limited experience, family relationships are complicated. Love is rarely pure, always laced with something else. Likewise, anger, even hatred was often undercut by love and loyalty.
While I watched, the big man took off his mask and lay it on the table. I knew it was him, but it still felt like a knife through the heart.
Mike. My mentor. My friend. The ground beneath my feet shifted.
“Paul’s doing better,” he said. “He was asking for you. I tried to call, finally had to make up an excuse that your phone was dead. I told him you’d come after your shift. He wants to talk to you.”
I felt a lurch of happiness, relief that Paul was okay for now, but it quickly sank into the pit of dread that my stomach had become.
The other man dragged the woman’s body to lie beside Beckham. I was surprised to feel a sob rise up in my throat. The student grows disillusioned with her teacher and so with everything he taught her. I thought of all those hours spent with him, all his words knocking around my head. He taught me so much about fighting, surviving, about myself and the watcher within. How could I reconcile that with the man who stood before me now?
“Tell me,” I said.
He released a sigh, long and slow. “You weren’t supposed to be there. Neither was your mother. Chad—he was supposed to be alone.”
My mind scrambled back there. Mom was supposed to be in Key West that night. I was sneaking out to meet Seth. But who knew that?
“Tell me everything,” I said. I searched his face for something I needed—remorse, sadness. But he had his fighting face on, features heavy, blank, eyes lidded, almost sleepy. Never let your face betray you—your effort, your fear, your anger. Let them look into a clean canvas that they can paint with their own insecurities. His words.
“Your dad heard about the money from a CI,” said Mike. “He told Paul about it, about plans he had to take it. Your father was in trouble—debt, some issues with gambling. He was into it with everyone from the credit card companies to a local loan shark. Paul talked him out of doing the job.”
Paul talked him out of it. Of course, he did. He’d never let my dad do something like that.
“So, Paul put together a team, me included, and we robbed Whitey Malone,” said Mike.
The information landed hard. Words can hurt worse than any blow.
“You and Paul?” I thought of the question my imaginary dad asked me back at the Bishops’ house. Do you want all your childhood illusions shattered? Had I on some level always suspected?
“You and Paul robbed a drug dealer and took a million dollars?”
“Don’t look so heartbroken, Zoey,” he said. Impatience curled his lip. “We robbed a drug dealer, not an orphanage.”
The other man dragged Rhett Beckham into the middle of the tarp. Then the woman. He left two thick skeins of blood along the blue-white of the tarp. I stared at Beckham. He was mine to kill, but I’d hesitated. Now he was dead, nothing but medical waste, everything he was in this world gone. I wanted to be happy he was dead, that he died ugly and stupid, cowering in front of someone bigger, stronger, tougher. But again, there was only that vast nothingness within me. No joy, no ecstatic sense of vindication, just a dark spiral.
You’re one of the good guys.
I wasn’t sure that was true. I mean—it obviously wasn’t. Maybe there weren’t any good guys.
“Paul paid us out,” Mike went on. “We were just the hired men, at a hundred each. Which was fine. It was Chad’s discovery, and Paul’s plan. It was seamless. We were in and out.”
I walked over to the man on the tarp, avoiding the slicks of blood. He stood to face me, and I lifted his mask. Seth. The muscles of his face did a little dance of shame.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I thought you were one of the good guys,” I said.
“I am,” he said, looking down at the bodies at his feet. “We’re none of us just one thing, are we, Zoey?”
He shook his head, then bent to fold the tarp over the bodies. Beckham and his girlfriend stared up at me from beneath the folds of the milky white film, surprised, disappointed in how things turned out.
“But Paul didn’t take his cut,” said Mike, still standing behind the table. “He didn’t want the money. That’s how he was. What he did? He didn’t even do it for Chad. That guy—I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, of your father. You loved him—but Chad was a user. He used Paul all their lives—not for me to judge. But Paul wanted that money for you and your mom. He wanted you to be safe, taken care of. That’s why he talked Chad out of doing the job, why he did it himself. If someone got hurt, if someone got caught, Paul wanted it to be him, not Chad. But it wasn’t fair that Chad got all of it. It just didn’t sit right with me.”
“So you hired Didion and Beckham to go get it from him?” I guessed.
Those half-lidded eyes revealed no emotion. He lifted his shoulders.
“We didn’t know your mom didn’t get on her plane. We didn’t know that your boyfriend wouldn’t show and that you’d come back so fast. And that bastard,” said Mike, shaking his head. I didn’t like the way he was talking about my father, even if it was all true. “He wouldn’t give up that money. And then everything went to shit. And Seth—who, by the way, had nothing to do with this back then, just your boyfriend, a stupid kid—called the cops. And that money sat, well hidden by your old man, all these years.”
My mind scrambled to put all the pieces together—the fractured versions of my father, of Mike, of Paul. They were in tatters; I couldn’t stitch them back together.
“You,” I said. “You were the fourth man. The one waiting in the car.”
At least he had the decency to hang his head.
“Who was the other guy with you the night you robbed Whitey Malone?” I asked. The world was spinning, but my voice was calm.