She's Not There (29 page)

“Where are you going?” Amelia asked.

He stopped. “I don’t know.”

“But—”

Alex hesitated and then came back. He leaned into her, and when he kissed her gently on the lips, she closed her eyes because it hurt. It hurt because they had been so good together, but for so brief a time. It hurt because they had both lost themselves somewhere in
us
.

“Good-bye, Mel,” he said softly.

He backed away a few steps, took a long look at Buchanan, and then disappeared into the wings.

Amelia stared into the darkness. She didn’t move until she heard the faint echo of a door slamming shut. She looked back at Buchanan. His gun was stuck in his belt. Her revolver was a few feet away and she went to it and picked it up.

“You won’t need that for me,” Buchanan said.

“How can I be sure?” she asked.

“I told you. Because I’m not a murderer.”

Amelia lowered her gun. “Then what are you?”

He held her eyes, as if he were unsure how to answer. “I could’ve answered that a few weeks ago. But now I can’t.”

She looked toward the wings, then down at the revolver in her hands.

“You should keep that handy,” Buchanan said.

“I don’t want it.”

“Owen McCall still needs you dead.”

“I’m no threat to him.”

“He doesn’t know that.”

Amelia hesitated and then went to her duffel. She slipped the gun inside and stood up, looking Buchanan straight in the eye. She was tired and still confused about Alex, what had happened to her, and the motives of this strange man Clay Buchanan. But there was one thing now she knew for sure.

“I’ll take my chances,” she said. “I’m not running anymore.”

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Traffic was light as Buchanan steered the Toyota south on Interstate 280. He had the window down, breathing in the cool night air, which smelled of the bay and something vaguely medicinal. He could hear the whine of jets heading to San Francisco Airport. There was no need to hurry. In fact, he was looking for the right place to stop.

Finally, he saw it off in the distance to his left, a gleam of dark water. He took the Islais Creek exit and headed down a dark empty road past warehouses and trash-heaped lots until he stopped at the dead end of Indiana and Tulare Streets.

To his left was a massive corrugated steel building, locked and abandoned. To his right was a lot filled with ruined and rusted MUNI buses.

He killed the engine, got out and walked toward the water. There was a park of some sort—or at least the start of one—with concrete benches and saplings braced with wires. But the trees were dead and the benches were slashed with skateboard scars. One bench bore a neon-yellow graffiti tag—
You thought you knew and now you do.

The only sound was the whir of tires from the nearby freeway.

Buchanan went to the edge of the walk and looked down. The water was dark and swirling, moving fast out to the bay. He pulled the nine-millimeter Nano from his pocket. He looked at it for a second and then flung it into the water.

He went back to the Toyota, started it up, and drove it into the bus lot, parking it between two dead streetcars. He got a screwdriver from the trunk, took off the license plates and heaved them into the trash. Then he flung his canvas tote and duffel over his good right shoulder and started walking back up Indiana Street.

It was near nine by the time the cab dropped him off at the airport. Inside the terminal, he paused in front of the departure board. There was a Delta flight leaving at eleven for Nashville. A quick layover in Atlanta and he would be home by eight tomorrow morning.

But then his eyes drifted right.

Auckland.

Beijing.

London Heathrow.

Hong Kong.

Manila.

Sydney.

He had about three thousand dollars in his wallet, all that was left of the last advance money McCall had given him. He couldn’t risk using his credit card—for the same reason he had taken the trouble to remove the plates from the Toyota. McCall was probably still going to come after him, so he had to make himself as hard to find as possible. That meant he was about to become a runner for the rest of his life.

His eyes lingered on the international departure board. Then he went to the Delta desk. As he waited his turn, he pulled out his wallet to count his money. Wedged between the hundred-dollar bills was the photograph.

He pulled it out and stared at Gillian’s face.

“Sir?”

He looked up at the clerk and stepped forward.

“Where are you headed, sir?”

“Nashville, please, your eleven o’clock flight.”

“Yes, sir. Will that be economy?”

“Yup. One way.”

The young woman punched at her computer keyboard. “You’re in luck. One seat left. Row thirty-five, seat F.”

Fuck. Right in the middle of the Airbus.

“I’ll take it,” Buchanan said.

He started to put Gillian’s photograph away, pushing it down as far as it would go in the wallet. It caught on something, and he pulled out the little brass key.

Buchanan stared at it. He stared hard at the key in his big hands, but he was suddenly seeing it instead hanging around the slender wrist of someone else, a young blonde woman who was snapping the key’s plastic band impatiently because no one was paying attention to her.

His eyes shot up to the departure board.

“Wait,” he said.

The clerk looked up.

“You got any seats left on the eleven-fifteen flight to Fort Lauderdale?” he asked.

The clerk tapped some computer buttons and then nodded. “Yes, we do. I can give you seat G in row twenty-one.”

Buchanan started to hand over the money and then paused. “How much for business class?” he asked.

“Two thousand seven hundred and fifty-five cents,” she said.

Buchanan pulled out the wad of money and counted out twenty-eight hundred-dollar bills. A few minutes later, the clerk handed him his ticket and pointed her pen to the left. “Gate eight, sir. Boarding is at ten thirty, but you’re welcome to wait in our Sky Club lounge.”

“I think I’ll do that,” Buchanan said. And he started away.

“Sir!”

He turned back.

“You forgot your change.”

He looked down at the money on the counter. Ninety-nine dollars and forty-five cents. He scooped it up, thanked the clerk, and walked away.

Do you like to gamble, Mr. Buchanan?

I don’t like giving my money away.

I love to gamble. It’s not about the money, it’s about winning.

Megan McCall was right. It wasn’t about the money and this was probably a stupid thing he was about to do. But he had a hunch about this, and he was putting all of what was left from McCall’s last bundle of advance money on double zero.

The red-eye flight got him into Fort Lauderdale at nine. He grabbed a coffee and bagel from the Dunkin’ Donuts kiosk at the airport, snarfed them down, and then headed outside. He got a cab and asked the guy to take him to the nearest mall.

In Target, he bought a pair of white shorts, a white Mossimo polo shirt, white sneakers and crew socks, and a seventeen-dollar tennis racket. He changed clothes in the store’s restroom, stuffed his other clothes into his duffel and caught another taxi. The cabbie didn’t ask any questions when Buchanan asked the driver to leave him two blocks away from his destination and wait.

The guy manning the parking lot booth at the Lauderdale Yacht Club didn’t ask any questions either as Buchanan walked right past the gate with a smile and salute of his tennis racket.

Buchanan paused just inside the entrance, bouncing the racket lightly on his palm. The place was almost deserted; it was too early for the lunch crowd. But the same guy who had stopped him that day he had come to meet Joanna McCall was at his station outside the restaurant.

Squaring his shoulders, Buchanan headed straight toward him.

“Can you direct me to the locker rooms, please?”

“Yes, sir. Just down that hall there,” the young man said with a smile.

“Thanks.”

“Enjoy your game, sir,” he said.

“I intend to.”

Jizz. All you had to do was have the right jizz.

There were two old guys in the locker room, sitting in towels on benches, and neither looked up as Buchanan made his way through the rows of beige metal lockers. There weren’t that many and for a moment Buchanan was beginning to doubt his hunch. And then, there it was.

Locker 328.

Buchanan stared at the number for a long time and then pulled his wallet from the pocket of his shorts. The locker was small, one of those half-length ones. He inserted the little brass key into the small padlock and turned.

The lock clicked open. Buchanan swung the door wide.

The blue vinyl Adidas gym bag was wedged in sideways. Buchanan eased it out, testing its weight. Heavy, maybe forty pounds.

He sat down on the bench, the gym bag on his knees. He took a deep breath and unzipped the bag.

Neat white-gray bundles of paper. Lots of them.

Buchanan glanced around, saw no one, and pulled out one of the bundles. There was a crisp hundred-dollar bill on top, with a gold band over it that said $10,000.

How many bundles? His brain was buzzing too loud to do the math. He didn’t want to. He just wanted to get out of here as fast as he could. He slipped the bundle back in the Adidas bag and zipped it shut.

Back in the lobby, the young man in the blue blazer gave Buchanan an odd look as he headed to the entrance.

“Quick game,” Buchanan said. “I won.”

The cabbie who had waited for him got a hundred-dollar tip. The kid who carried his bag up to the suite at the W Hotel got a fifty, the last of McCall’s dirty advance money.

Buchanan put the Adidas bag in the room safe, flung the sliding glass doors wide open, poured a Maker’s Mark from the minibar and laid down on the king-sized bed.

But he didn’t take a drink. He just lay there, eyes closed, feeling the warm ocean breeze wash over him. He was thinking about what he was going to do with the money, about how he could buy a good lawyer to help him with the indictment and getting Gillian back, how he could go back to Nashville and get back to his life. He was thinking about . . .

Turtles.

Those poor damn baby turtles down there on the beach who lost their way and followed the wrong lights to their death. He was thinking about turtles and birds and unicorns and his head was getting really fucked up, and he hadn’t even had one drink. He was thinking that what he had been doing since he had lost her was not really what he wanted to do anymore.

Then what are you?

It took him a moment to realize it wasn’t her. It wasn’t Rayna talking to him. It was Amelia.

And it took him another moment to realize he didn’t know the answer.

He sat up slowly in the bed. He didn’t know the answer, but he knew where he had to go to find it.

But first, he had to go find one last runner.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Alex had to wait until the fishing boat made its way through the inlet. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t in any hurry now. The low drawbridge eased back down into place, and Alex put the car in gear and drove on, past the old lighthouse and down a narrow road.

The car window was down, and the air flowed over him sweet with the smell of the sea and something in bloom. The sky was starting to turn pink and gold as the car entered a thick tunnel of trees, the twisting banyans and sea grapes swaying in the stiff breeze. The road was lined by huge lush ferns, magenta bougainvillea, and scarlet hibiscus bushes.

Alex slowed, looking for the sign, and finally spotted it almost hidden in the row of date palms—
BHG B
UILDERS
. The chain-link fence was open. He swung his car down the rutted dirt road, parked behind a yellow Caterpillar backhoe and got out.

It rose up before him, huge and gray, a concrete shell of a building. Three floors, the windows covered in protective blue film, the balconies rimmed with scaffolding, the unfinished staircases leading nowhere.

He spotted a black Bentley half-hidden behind a bunker of cement bags and started toward it.

“Alex!”

He looked up. McCall was standing on a second-floor balcony, leaning over a makeshift wood railing.

“Come on up,” McCall said. He disappeared into the concrete shell.

Alex picked his way across the construction debris and through a yawning gap in the front of the house into a cave of rebar and dangling conduit. He spotted a bare concrete staircase and went up to the second floor.

The breeze was brisker here, snaking in through open archways that led to a trio of balconies overlooking the ocean. Alex glanced around as he walked, at the cathedral ceilings and the rainbow marble slabs that framed a hole in the wall for a future giant aquarium.

“You’re late,” McCall said.

He was a large silhouette in an archway, the sky behind him a gradient splash of orange and blue.

“I got caught in traffic.”

“How was your trip to California?” McCall asked.

Alex was quiet, not surprised McCall knew where he had been. Megan had probably told him.

“It was a failure,” Alex said. “As you would say, I couldn’t close the deal.”

McCall nodded. “You used to be the best closer I ever met.”

“I can be again.”

McCall’s brow lifted. “Is that why you wanted to meet me? You wanted to ask if you could come back?” he asked.

“Yes.”

McCall walked out to the balcony and stood at the railing. Alex followed him, hands in his pockets. Out in the fading light, Alex could see the lingering bruises on McCall’s cheek, where he had hit him the night they argued.

“I’m ready to move on, get things back to normal,” Alex said. He tried a smile. “Get to work on the next million.”

McCall was silent, just staring at him. “What made you change your mind?”

Alex hesitated. “Mel. It’s over between us. I see that now.”

McCall shook his head. “You know it’s not that simple. We’ve still got a problem out there. Both of us.”

“What do you mean?” Alex asked.

McCall took a step back, his gaze moving slowly over Alex’s body and back up to his face.

“You wearing a wire, Alex?”

“What?”

“Did the Feds get to you? What did they offer you?”

“Fuck, Owen . . .”

“Take off your jacket,” McCall demanded.

Alex slowly removed his coat and spread his arms. McCall stepped close and patted Alex down, from his shoulders to his ankles.

“Empty your pockets,” McCall said.

“I would never turn on you, Owen. I have as much—”

“Prove it to me. Empty your pockets.”

Alex stepped back inside the shell of the house and set his keys, cell phone, change, money clip, and his jacket on a worktable, leaving his pants pockets turned inside out. McCall motioned him back to the balcony, where he led him a good twenty feet away.

“Want me to strip naked too?” Alex asked.

McCall stared at him, his eyes dark with suspicion. “Trust is like a mirror, Alex. You can fix it, but you can always see the crack.”

“Trust goes both ways,” Alex said. “You hired someone to kill my wife.”

McCall reached into his pocket and withdrew a cigar. Alex watched him as he bit off the end and turned his back to the breeze to light it. The smoke disappeared quickly into the dusky light.

“I only want one thing,” Alex said.

“And what’s that?”

“I want you to call off Buchanan.”

McCall just stood there, sucking on the cigar.

“Mel doesn’t remember anything,” Alex said. “She doesn’t remember finding the flamingo. She doesn’t even remember why she was going to Marco Island or who was in the car with her.”

“But she might.”

“The doctor told me she’d probably never remember what happened. I’m telling you, that night is lost to her.”

“But you still love her. And that makes you a liability to me.”

Alex nodded slowly. “But I love something else more.”

McCall glanced at him, as if he were bored. “What?”

Alex gestured toward the view. “This. I want this. I want what you want. I want to be able to buy four houses on the beach, tear them down and build something better.” He paused. “You were right about me, Owen. You always were.”

McCall laughed softly and blew out a stream of smoke.

Alex drew a shallow breath, shivering in the cooling breeze.

“All right,” McCall said. “I’ll call Buchanan off, but only temporarily. I’m going to be watching her.”

“I can live with that.”

“And I want you to give me that damn bird from Mary’s car.”

“I’d like to hang on to it,” Alex said. “I need some insurance of my own. Like you said, our trust level is a little low right now.”

McCall stepped closer to him. “Understand one thing, Alex. Nobody extorts me. Not you, not your crazy wife, not anyone.”

“You killed an innocent woman.”

“It had to be done. And I will not be held ransom with a damn plastic toy you picked up out of the mud. Are we clear?”

Yes. Yes.

“I said, are we clear?”

“Yes.”

“Bring it to me tomorrow at the office,” McCall said. “Once I have it, you can come back to work.”

Alex nodded. McCall walked to a trash can, stubbed his cigar out on the side and tossed the butt inside.

“We’re finished here,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Alex looked out at the horizon. The orange-blue had faded to a thin red line that hung over it like a streak of blood.

“You coming?” McCall asked.

“I think I’ll stay a few minutes and watch the sun go down. Do you mind?”

McCall hesitated. “Suit yourself.”

Alex stayed on the balcony until he heard McCall’s footsteps fade, and then slowly walked to the table and picked up his jacket. As he gathered up his things, he paused, staring down at the money clip.

It was platinum, yet another gift from McCall when they had closed some big deal. He couldn’t remember which one now, but it didn’t matter. He pulled the bills from the clip, put them in his pocket, and set the clip on the worktable.

Downstairs, he walked to the center of the sandy yard, but instead of heading toward his car, he followed a path up through the trees, into an adjacent empty lot. He could hear the rush of the ocean, taste salt in the air, feel the beat of his own heart.

A man in a navy-blue windbreaker stepped out from behind a bush. The yellow letters stamped across the right side of his jacket said FBI. Behind him was another man, in a dark suit and white shirt.

The FBI agent held out a hand. Alex took off his Patek Philippe watch and handed it to him. The agent turned it over, peeled off the small electronic bug, and looked back at Alex.

“Well done, Mr. Tobias.”

Alex didn’t say anything, couldn’t say anything. The man in the suit stepped forward. “You got him to confess to the murder of your secretary but you didn’t get him to talk about the securities fraud.”

Alex looked away, toward the dark ocean. “Just do a forensic audit of the books,” he said. “You’ll find everything you need.”

The man in the suit walked away. The FBI agent held out a pair of cuffs.

“It’s time, Mr. Tobias.”

Alex turned around and put his hands in front of him. He closed his eyes as the agent snapped the steel cuffs around his wrists. He had managed to broker himself immunity from any SEC or fraud charges in exchange for getting a confession from McCall on Mary’s murder.

The first charge was just about stealing money from people, the agent had explained, something banks did legally every day. But Mary Carpenter’s murder, that was something different. Because Mary was a potential witness, killed to prevent her from testifying about a crime, her murder was considered a federal offense. The lowest charge the Feds would offer him was Accessory to Murder. Five to fifteen years in a federal prison.

“Let’s go, Mr. Tobias,” the agent said, taking his arm.

Alex walked with the agent, across the sand, toward a dark sedan sitting near the road. His breath started to quicken and his heart rate kicked into high.

He was scared. Scared of what was going to happen to him in prison. Scared of what his life would be like for the next decade. Scared he would not survive it.

But, Mel . . .

She would be safe.

And that thought, that one single thought trickling through the wash of almost paralyzing fear, gave him the strength to keep walking.