Envy the Night (25 page)

“He’s gone, Frank. He left the hospital against doctor’s orders, and he’s gone. Now, I don’t know what the hell is going on up there, but I think he wants a part of it. And you need to be gone when he gets there. All right? You need to be
gone
.”

Frank didn’t say anything, but his breathing had changed, slowed.

“Are you listening, Frank? Get out of there, first thing in the morning.”

“I don’t have a car,” Frank said, and there was something in his tone that made Grady get out of bed and onto his feet.

“Look, I’ll drive up there myself. I’ll drive up and talk to this Atkins guy and then you can ride back down with me. Leave them to figure it out. That’s what you’ve got to do, Frank.”

“No, Grady. You stay down there. Okay? You stay down there.”

“Frank—”

“Thanks for the insight, though. This is important to know.”

“If you know where Vaughn is, you’ve got to tell—”

“I’ll talk to you soon, Grady. Thanks again.”

He hung up, and Grady swore loudly into the dead phone. The conversation had ended too fast. Grady should have told him. It was time now. He had to tell him. He turned the light on, and blinked against the harsh brightness until he could see the numbers clear enough to call back.

Frank had turned the phone off again.

__________

T
he flashlight blinked three times, then stopped. Ezra waited for the pause, then hit the lights on his boat, just tapped them on and right back off, enough to show Frank that he understood the signal.

It was almost two in the morning, and Frank wanted Ezra to come in? This couldn’t be good. Ezra ignored the outboard—too noisy—and turned the trolling motor on, brought the boat in to the beach with no sound but that soft electric whir. Frank met him in the shallows, waded out, and took the bow line and threaded it through the U-bolt Ezra and Frank’s father had bored into the log wall long ago.

“You all right?” Ezra stepped off the boat and onto firm ground.

“We’re fine.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

There were no lights on the boat or outside the cabin, and Frank’s face was only a few shades lighter than the shadows that surrounded it.

“Devin’s on his way.”

The wind was blowing warm and steady out of the southwest, and Ezra turned his face into it, breathed it in.

“How do you know?”

“Just talked to Grady Morgan. You remember him?”

“FBI.”

“That’s right.”

“Didn’t seem to be my biggest fan.”

“Didn’t know you.”

“Sure,” Ezra said. “Well, what did Mr. Morgan have to say?”

What Frank told him then made some sense. Made a lot of sense, actually, because the one thing Ezra had never been able to get his head around was why Devin would possibly have called him and told him to open the cabin up. The only reason he could have understood was if it had been a taunt, Devin deciding he’d screw with an old man’s head, make it damn clear that Ezra no longer intimidated him or never had. Problem with that was the tone of the call. The message had been simple, businesslike, as if he’d never had a problem with Ezra. The answer, Ezra understood now, was that it hadn’t been Devin who made the call. The other guy, Vaughn, had apparently understood Ezra’s role as caretaker, but it didn’t seem he knew the back story.

“He’s out of the hospital,” Ezra said when Frank was done, “with three bullets in him?”

“That’s what I’ve been told.” Frank was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and Ezra could see the muscles of his chest and shoulders under the shirt, taut and hard in the easy, natural way they could be only when you were young. Ezra could remember when he had looked like that. Could remember when Frank’s father had looked like that. The boy’s features didn’t resemble his father, he’d taken after his mother in that way, but the way he stood now, the energy in his words, the eagerness for battle . . . those traits ran warm through his blood.

“Sounds like Devin’s hurt bad, then,” Ezra said. “Hell, he might not make it up here, son.”

“But you know he’s coming,” Frank said. “You know he is. That’s his wife out there on that island, and either she shot him or Vaughn did. They betrayed him, tried to kill him. You think he could be headed anywhere else?”

Ezra didn’t answer, and after a few beats of silence Frank said, “He gave my father up. Brought him into it, and then turned right around and gave him up to save his own ass.”

“I know the story, son.”

Frank extended his arm, pointed out across the dark water. “He’s coming for them, Ezra. The people out there on that island. Why? Because they tried to take him down, and that’s something I sure as hell respect. They did our work for us.”

“Unsuccessfully.”

“Fine. Unsuccessfully. But I’m not going to let that son of a bitch come out
here, to the place my father and his father and you and me all shared, and kill those two, Ezra. I’m not.”

“At least one of those two is headed for jail, Frank. You don’t want to interfere with that.”

“You want to see them go? You want to see them go to jail for shooting
Devin
? Don’t you remember—”

“I remember it all,” Ezra said, and there was a depth of anger he hadn’t heard to his own voice in a long time. “Don’t stand there and ask me if I remember. It goes back a hell of a lot farther than you, back to places you’ll never see and can’t imagine. Understand
that,
son?”

There was fury in his words, and he was leaning into Frank, his face close, but the boy didn’t back away. Just stood there and held Ezra’s eyes for a long time.

“Yeah,” Frank said at last. “I understand that. Now you listen to yourself, hear what you just said, and explain to me how in the
hell
you’re going let Devin go out to that island.”

“Didn’t say I would. I’m telling you there’s another option here.”

“The police? Shit, Ezra. You want somebody to go jail for trying to kill
Devin
?”

Ezra looked away, out into the lake, and said, “What do you want to do, then?”

“To get them out of here,” Frank said. “Is that so much to ask? We get them out of here. If he catches them somewhere else, fine, but he’s not going to settle up here. Not on this lake.”

“Get them out of here,” Ezra echoed. “That’s your goal?”

“It’s what I said.”

“And when you get in the middle of it? What then? Devin comes at you, or comes at the girl inside your cabin, the same way his boys already have?”

“If that happens,” Frank said, “we deal with it.”

Ezra gave a low, ugly laugh. “That’s what you’re hoping for. You want to hang that son of a bitch from one of these pines, but you also want it to be justified.”

“It’s already justified.”

“Bullshit, son. Not in a way you can accept it’s not, and you know that.”

Frank didn’t answer. The wind picked up and the water splashed into the logs below them and something rustled through the woods a few yards away.

“It’s going into action tomorrow,” Frank said eventually. “Whether it’s cops or Devin or those two assholes he sent up here, somebody is going out to that
island. Are we going to let them do it? Are we going to step aside and wait for that, pretend we don’t know anything?”

Ezra took a few steps away, knelt and dipped his hand into the lake, cupped his palm and held the water. It was cool against his skin, cool enough that the hairs on his arm rose in a ripple. He kept his fingers tight, held the water until it slipped through the fractional gaps and fell back into the lake, and then he turned to his old comrade’s son.

“No,” he said. “No, we’re not going to step aside and wait for that.”

__________

G
rady woke sometime before dawn with the knowledge that he had to play it straight with Atkins.

There was no way around it. Not at this point. He kept hearing Frank’s insistence that Grady stay in Chicago, hearing the way he’d said,
I don’t have a car,
when Grady urged him to leave. The kid was waiting for Devin, no doubt about it, and the smart money said he was going to get him, too.

Someone needed to intercede, and Atkins would be more than happy to do so. If Grady’s suspicion turned out to be accurate, and Frank did know where Vaughn Duncan was holed up, it was going to turn into an ugly day. But that was the sort of ugly day that paled in comparison to the one they’d see if Frank met Devin Matteson up in those woods.

It wasn’t yet six, too early to call Atkins, and Grady lay awake in the bed for almost an hour, watching sunlight fill the empty room and wondering how much of this was his fault.

It had been an anonymous tip, damn it. That’s what he told people from the beginning, what he’d assured them, and there were only a few people within the Bureau who knew the truth. On one level, he’d almost been showing
kindness
to Frank by telling him the tip had come from Matteson. It had seemed, back then, a lesser punishment to the boy, who was already reeling. Matteson was a worthless piece of shit, so what did Grady care if he’d added another layer of tarnish to
the man’s name? Even in the worst-case scenario, one in which the kid plotted some act of vengeance, all that stood to be lost was Matteson, right? And that would be a damn favor to the community.

Except Matteson wasn’t all that stood to be lost. Grady had forgotten about the avenger. He could be lost, too.

At ten to seven he called Atkins and got no answer, left a message. At seven twenty, pacing the apartment with a cup of coffee going cold in his hand, he called again and left another message. Five minutes later Atkins finally called back.

“Didn’t hear the phone,” he said. “I was in the shower, sorry. What do you have for me?”

Grady lifted the cup, took a swallow of room-temperature coffee, and said, “I think Frank Temple knows where all the excitement is headed.”

“Pardon?”

“He didn’t kill anyone,” Grady said, “and I’m almost certain he’s more a bystander than anything else, but I think he might know where Vaughn Duncan is.”

“Why do you think this?”

“I spoke with him last night, and when I asked where Duncan was, he was very guarded. Evasive. That’s not Frank’s style. He doesn’t like to lie, and I think he was trying to avoid that last night by refusing to answer the question. If he didn’t know, or didn’t have some idea, at least, he would have told me that.”

A long pause.

“You there?” Grady said.

“I’m here.” The other agent’s voice was drawn tight with anger. “I’m just wondering who I’ll have to call in Chicago to make a formal complaint.”

“Because I talked to Frank? Listen, Atkins, you don’t—”

“No, I’m not going to listen. What you just did is such a flagrant breach of conduct . . . what the hell were you thinking? I tell you this kid is a
suspect
, I ask you for input, not to get on the damn phone and—”

“I knew I could get you some answers.”

“Bullshit. And even if you did think that, you don’t make a call like that without informing me first.”

“Atkins, you’re missing the point.”

“This is one of the most egregious—”

“Vaughn Duncan may be up there with another man’s wife,” Grady said. “You want to know who the man is, or not?”

Silence.

“A guy named Devin Matteson was shot in Florida a few days ago. Matteson is a key player for Manuel DeCaster. That name mean anything to you?”

“No.”

“Well, it does down in Florida. He’s one of the worst they’ve got, and one of the most powerful. He’s in prison now, in Coleman, and about seven years ago Frank Temple’s father was making hits for him.”

Atkins didn’t make a sound, but Grady could almost
hear
the battle going on within him, curiosity fighting anger.

“Matteson won’t tell the police who shot him. But his wife is missing. So it’s not much of a puzzle, is it? And now this guard from Coleman, Vaughn Duncan, he’s up at that lake, and there’s a woman with him,” Grady said. “You want to take odds on who the woman is, I’ve got a retirement account I’ll put on Matteson’s wife.”

Atkins started to speak, but Grady rushed ahead. “And Matteson’s missing, he’s out of the hospital, he’s gone. You understand what that means? He’s coming north, Atkins. I would bet every dime I have that he is coming up to that lake.”

“And I’m still supposed to believe the coincidence,” Atkins said. His voice was clipped, tight.

“What coincidence? That Frank’s up there?”

“That’s the one. Bystander?
Bystander?
You out of your mind, Morgan? You really believe, and expect me to believe, that this kid just
happened
to smack his Jeep into his own father’s filthy history? That’s an
accident
?”

No. It wasn’t an accident. Couldn’t be. Grady wanted to believe that it was, but he knew better. Frank’s presence on that lake wasn’t a fluke. That was why it was so important for Atkins to intercede now.

“Look,” Grady said, “I’m not going to waste my time or yours discussing what I think about that kid. I’m telling you that—”

“I cannot believe you called him. You son of a bitch, you called a
suspect
and warned him—”

“
He knows where Vaughn is and he knows Devin is coming for him!
” Grady shouted. “Would you shut up long enough to understand that, Atkins? You want to bitch and moan about me, do it Monday. Shit, call Quantico, call Washington, call anybody you want. Right now that doesn’t mean a damn thing. What matters is that you’ve got a dangerous son of a bitch headed your way to settle up with his wife and this other guy, and Frank Temple knows that.”

“How does he know that?”

“Because I told him. And I’d tell him again today, and if you want to get me fired over that, knock yourself out. But you’ve got something up there waiting to
explode
, and you need to deal with it.”

“Temple is at his cabin?” Atkins said, his voice still angry, but lower.

“Yeah. It’s out on some lake—”

“I know where it is.”

“Okay.” Grady hesitated, then said, “If he’s not there, he might be with a man named Ezra Ballard. You need to get him away from Ballard.”