“Never mind. Forget it. So where are you hauling me off to? Casinolake again?” There had been a time, just after the last boss died unexpectedly and David and another capo were each trying to take over the clan, when David had sent her and the twins quickly to Casinolake. It was a bad several weeks, hell with six-year-old boys whose only source for recreation was the hotel swimming pool. Casinolake was an adult vacation destination, a place where middle-aged men gathered in packs to gamble, play golf, drink whiskey, smoke cigars, and contract the services of prostitutes, and Marta could only guess that David had chosen it as a hideout for them because he had the management in a stranglehold, or because it seemed like such an implausible place to put away a wife and children for safe keeping. Whatever the reason, Marta had spent her shapeless days stewing with resentment, then vibrating with it; the minute the boys slipped into sleep each night she started downing liquor, wondering when their imprisonment would end, and how, and if the next knock on the door would be her husband or the hotel staff or someone who had been sent to do away with her. Then, when her legs tired, or the liquor had sedated her, she climbed into bed and played webshows on her tablet all night, one episode after another after another, moving dully between watching and dreaming and not knowing the next day which had been which.
I could kill him, she had thought a thousand times. And, I’ll divorce him. Her anger had solidified by the end into a certainty, a plan; she would never put her sons through this again, she would never put herself through this again, and damn David for thinking he could ask it of them. But when David had finally arrived, victorious, to bring her and the children home, she had known instantly that things had changed irrevocably—that this was a man who would never suffer the indignity of being left, even if a part of him would be secretly glad to rid himself of her; a man who would kill her before he let her turn his sons, the heir and the spare, against him. In a way, she had been stuck at Casinolake ever since. Her prison had only gotten larger, and she was jingling and jangling with the same restless fury, a fury that made her want to walk grooves into the polished wood floors of their six-hundred-square-meter home. When the boys left for college her anxiety grew, and no amount of liquor was able to soothe it, and that was when she started using the drugs.
Now, here she was again. Some danger was on the horizon, and she couldn’t even be with the boys if the worst were to happen. This time, she was alone.
“Not Casinolake,” he said. “I have something else in mind. Something out-of-zone.”
Her heart—it seemed to almost quiver rather than beat. “I thought you said it wasn’t that bad.”
“I said I was being overly cautious.”
“Out-of-zone cautious?”
He rose, crossed the room to the banquette, and poured another finger of vodka into his highball glass. Then he held the glass so that the base sat flat on his palm, a funny affectation of his that stretched back to their earliest days together, when he was the scrawny, gawky young man she had fallen in love with, a man whose streak of cruel entitlement had only yet manifested as improbable confidence, charming then because it seemed so mismatched with his physical self. “It’s good news, mostly. I have a major deal lined up. Something that’s going to make us a lot of money. And it’s legit money. One hundred percent legit.”
Marta frowned. “What’s the ‘mostly’ part?”
“I have to do something kind of bold to clench it. And when I do the thing I have to do, I want us all lying low for a little while.”
“What’s this thing you have to do?”
“Honey,” he said, “you don’t want to know.”
He was right. She didn’t.
Out-of-zone. She uncapped her necklace vial and took a bump—she hadn’t planned on it that night, but Christ—and pondered the possibilities. Slum-ridden Gulf Zone, where even the better hotels were constantly getting shut down for tick infestations, and if the ticks didn’t get you, the street gangs would? Midwest Zone was no better. New England had stricter quarantine sanctions than Atlantic Zone—Marta doubted that even David had the power to get her over there this year—and Pacific Zone, by every report, was still so drought-ridden and poisoned that drinking water sold for a hundred credits a liter. You saw the Pacificans in the feeds wearing micromasks everywhere, even to sit in their own homes, and Marta thought the worst sign of all was that the webshows out of the West Coast, which used to be the best, were in recent years poorly produced and unpredictably transmitted.
The thing was, you hoped like hell to be in a zone as clean and safe as Atlantic, and if by birth or luck or talent you got in one, you stayed put—because the rules kept changing, the quarantines and security measures kept getting revised, and everyone knew the story of at least one person who traveled interzone and got stuck somewhere for weeks, or months, or even forever. What if David sent her somewhere but couldn’t get her back once the heat was off?
“What did you have in mind for me?” she said quietly.
“You remember that adventure touring company I invested in a few years back? Outer Limits Excursions?”
It took her a few beats to process this. First, just the words: adventure touring company. What that even meant. Then, the implication—
“Good lord, David. You can’t be serious. You don’t mean to—”
“Hear me out,” David said harshly. “This is a completely professional outfit. They know what they’re doing, and their rate getting people back home is nearly perfect.”
“Nearly,” Marta said jeeringly.
“It’s VIP all the way. You wouldn’t believe some of the people going on this trip. Wes Feingold. Wes Feingold’s going on this trip. And if there’s a rich little cocksucker you want to be standing near when the world goes to hell, he’s the one.”
She felt the sharp, strangling fingers of panic at her throat, making it hard to breathe. “I don’t want to do this, David. I can’t do this. I’m in my fifties. I don’t . . . hike. I’m not in any kind of shape for that. I’d rather risk staying here than go on that trip.”
He walked across the room to her, hard-soled shoes surprisingly light and silent on the tile floor, and grasped her chin between his thumb and the crook of his forefinger just hard enough to contort her neck uncomfortably. “This is not a choice. This is not about what you want. If I say you put on your hiking boots and start marching your way down to the Wall this very night, you do it. Do you even realize how lucky you are?”
Their eyes locked for an agonizingly slow moment, his thumbnail just creasing the skin on her chin, the vein running up along the edge of his nose pulsing visibly. He’d had three cosmetic procedures in the last eight years, most recently a face-lift and eye rejuvenation, and though the work was eerily good—he looked, in all the superficial ways, much as he had in his early forties, when he first became boss—there was a shadow of the older man under the surgeon’s fine work. Did David see the same shadow when he looked at her? She had resisted all but the standard procedures (a person of her means would no sooner opt against an eye rejuv than she would neglect to wear sunscreen or take her metabolizers), and she had insisted on not coloring her graying hair, which may have been nothing more than piddling contrariness—a way to undercut David, to thwart his will, without seeming as if that were her object. But still, there were times when she looked in the mirror and didn’t know herself, when it seemed that past and present had converged in her features, her haunted, fifty-four-year-old eyeballs framed by tight, plump new skin cells.
David let go of her chin, finally. His mouth pulled up a little in the corner. “So. Do we have an understanding?”
—