Envy the Night (40 page)

“Get up!”
Frank screamed. “Get up and go for the gun, you piece of shit!”

Again the smile, and Devin just shook his head. “Can’t reach it.”

Frank ran to the table and kicked its legs, upending it and spilling Devin’s gun to the floor. It hit a few feet away from him, slid to a stop almost within reach.

“
Pick it up!
”

Devin shook his head again, and this time Frank went for him. He hit him backhanded with the Smith & Wesson, caught the side of his skull, knocked him away from the wall and back to the floor. He let out a soft moan of pain but didn’t move, didn’t reach for the gun. Frank reached down with his free hand and caught Devin’s neck, dragged him upright, and then slammed his head into the wall, still screaming at him to pick up the gun. He banged his head off the wall again, and then a third time, and then he dropped to one knee and jammed the barrel of his father’s gun into Devin’s mouth.

It was then, down on his knee with his finger on the trigger, that he saw Devin was unconscious.

He let go of Devin’s neck and pulled the gun out of his mouth and Devin’s head fell onto his right shoulder and the torso went with it. He landed with his body bent awkwardly, one lip peeled back by the floor, a trace of blood showing in his mouth now.

Frank laid his fingers against Devin’s neck, felt the pulse there. He was not dead.

He got to his feet and stared down as Devin’s eyes fluttered but stayed closed. He took the gun and laid it against the back of Devin’s skull, held it there for a few seconds, feeling the trigger under his finger.

I’d find him and I’d kill him.

Damn right you would. Damn right. You’re a good boy. Check that—a good man.

It’s justified, Frank had told Ezra. It is already justified. And Ezra’s response?
Bullshit, son. Not in a way you can accept it’s not, and you know that.

Devin made some sound, a muffled grunt, and stirred but did not wake. Frank moved the gun across the back of his head, traced a circle in Devin’s
hair with the muzzle. He thought again of Nora, of the fear in her eyes as she’d looked at him, and then he pulled the gun back and walked away. He picked up the table and set it back where it belonged, beneath his grandfather’s posthumous Silver Star. He looked at the medal for a moment, and then he dropped his eyes to the gun in his hand, and he ejected the clip into his palm. He took Devin’s gun from the floor and emptied that clip as well, and then he walked into the kitchen and set both guns on the counter, put the clips into his pocket, and ran cold water onto a towel.

When he turned off the water he could hear a boat motor, and he stood at the sink with his head cocked and listened. Something small, and headed this way. He went to the window, looked out at the lake, and saw the aluminum boat approaching, Nora up front and Renee at the tiller. Not surprising that Renee had refused to go to the dam.

He slapped at Devin’s neck with the wet towel, then held it over his face and squeezed a trickle of cold water onto his forehead and cheeks. The eyes opened, swam, then focused on Frank.

“Get up,” Frank said. “Your wife’s coming.”

When they arrived, Devin was sitting up against the wall, Frank standing in the kitchen with his back against the counter, near the guns. Renee came through the door first, saw Frank and said, “If you—” but then her eyes found Devin and she stopped talking and turned from Frank and ran to her husband.

“Baby,” he said, and he reached for her with one arm as she fell to her knees in front of him, almost in the exact position Frank had taken when he put his father’s suicide gun in Devin’s mouth.

Nora stepped inside, stood in the doorway staring at Renee on the floor with Devin before she looked at Frank. Her eyes searched his, then flicked to the guns on the counter.

“They’re empty,” he said, and he pushed off the counter and walked into the living room. Renee turned at the sound of his approach, a protective motion, covering Devin with her body.

“Get him up,” Frank said, “and get out of here.”

“All right.”

“The keys to the van are inside it, I think. You’ve got to get him out there, though. I’m not helping. If I touch him again, I’m going to kill him.”

She just nodded.

Frank turned and walked outside, leaving the empty guns on the counter. Nora followed him, and a few minutes later Renee appeared, with Devin on
his feet but leaning heavily against her. Frank and Nora stood together beside the cabin and watched as she got the van door open and got him inside.

“You’re letting them go,” Nora said.

He shook his head. “They aren’t going far. He’s got to get to a hospital. Anybody can see that.”

She didn’t answer. Renee slammed the van door shut and walked toward the driver’s door. She paused for a moment in front of the van and looked back at them.

“Thank you,” she said. “And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

There was a beat of silence, and then Frank said, “You know what he does. You know what he is. So how the hell do you love him so clean?”

“Hon,” she said, “whoever said anything about it being clean?”

Frank looked away from her, out at the lake. He didn’t turn when the doors opened, didn’t turn when the engine started, didn’t turn when they drove up the gravel drive.

When the sound of the van had faded and they were alone, Nora said, “Is there a phone inside?”

“No.”

“Mine’s ruined. The water.”

“Yeah. Mine, too.”

“Where can we go to call the police?”

He waved toward the drive, and then they turned and started up it together, not speaking, stepping over puddles and through the mud. They were halfway to the main road when they heard the hum of an engine and the crunch of tires and Nora said, “Are they coming back?”

They weren’t coming back. It was a car, not a van, and when it slid to a stop and the door opened and Grady Morgan stood up and stared at them, all Frank could say was “You’re too late, Grady. Too late.”

Grady looked over his shoulder and then back at Frank. “Who was that? Who was in that van?”

“Devin Matteson and his wife,” Frank said.

“I can’t let them drive away from here.”

“Sure you can,” Frank said. “You never saw them. Didn’t know who it was. Didn’t ask me about it just now.”

Grady looked at Frank for a long time and said, “I’ve lied about him before. I guess I can do it again. Now what the hell happened out here?”

__________

S
ix hours later, Frank and Nora long departed in police custody, Ezra Ballard evacuated to some hospital, first by boat and then by helicopter, Grady stood alone at the shore and stared out into the dark lake where several bodies waited to be found.

Atkins was dead. Another agent, one who’d been trying to do the job right, was dead, and Grady would see that blood on his hands for the rest of his days, understood that it was the end of his career long before anyone back in Chicago would.

Too late. That was the first thing Frank Temple’s son had said to him. Grady had been too late.

Frank had no idea, either. He had no idea.

Seven years of watching that kid, keeping tabs on him, and it had never been about protecting Frank from anything. It had always been about protecting Grady, about covering his own ass. He’d never had the courage to approach the kid and tell him the truth and apologize, and now they were bringing body after body out of this damn lake, one of them a dead agent, a colleague.

Too late. Yes, Frank, I was too late.

Grady Morgan and the Seven-Year Lie. He could have gotten the nerve just a year ago, six years too late and still it would have been in time for this. If he’d tracked Frank down then and told him the truth, how much blood would have
been spilled? Not as much, that was for sure. There would have been some, Devin Matteson’s gunmen would have seen to that, but not as many people would have died, certainly not Atkins. If Frank had known Devin wasn’t responsible for his father’s demise, he never would have headed north, never would have seen Vaughn Duncan or had anything to do with it. Those two from Miami would have made their way north quietly, killed Duncan and taken Renee home to see her husband.

It was a sick world, Grady thought, when you could stand on the shore of a beautiful lake like this and long for one murder. One murder that would have saved the others. Everybody with their damn score to settle, and Frank in the midst of it with one that didn’t need settling.

He was done with the Bureau. Wouldn’t have to be—all of this was indirect involvement, he was close to retirement, and the Bureau loved to handle such things quietly and in-house—but he knew he’d resign now. Should have seven years ago, but it wasn’t too late to do it now, and he felt he owed Atkins that much. Atkins wouldn’t have wanted a guy like Grady left in his Bureau.

The truth would start with Frank, though. The hell with the people in Chicago who would hear it next; Frank was the one that mattered.

He didn’t see him again until the next morning, and while there were still cops moving around the lake—and still divers looking for Atkins—they were alone in the cabin, sitting with their backs to the window that looked out on the lake and its grisly activity.

Ezra Ballard was alive and recovering from a single gunshot that had blown through his ribs and wreaked some internal havoc but left him to see another day, and that’s what Frank wanted to talk about at first.

“He’ll make it,” Frank said after he finished filling Grady in on all the medical details Grady had already heard.

“Yes.”

“One of the few, though. One of the few, and you don’t need to tell me how much of that is my responsibility, Grady. I understand it.”

“That’s not the way anyone else is telling it,” Grady said. “You see the papers? You’re on the front page.”

“So was my dad.”

“They’re saying different things about you, though.”

Frank didn’t respond to that.

“You let Devin go,” Grady said. “Had him and let him go, there at the end. I saw the reports.”

A nod.

“It was the right thing to do,” Grady said, and his voice was so rigid, grandfatherly, none of the relief coming through in it. And it
was
relief, because a day earlier when the kid stood in this room with a gun in his hand he had somehow done the right thing, despite all the energy Grady had invested into priming him for the wrong thing.

“Anybody heard about him?” Frank said. “Has he turned up somewhere?”

Grady shook his head.

“I was sure that he would,” Frank said. “Sure of it. He’ll need a hospital. I’d be surprised if he didn’t, at least. Nobody’s blaming me for letting him walk, though. Wasn’t my job, they keep saying.”

“It was the right thing to do,” Grady said again. “And I need to explain that to you.”

“I get it, Grady.”

“No, Frank. No, you do not.”

Frank tilted his head and squinted against the sunlight, and Grady finally opened his mouth and let the truth out.

“I was seventeen years old,” Frank said when he was done. It was the first thing he’d said in a long time, Grady doing all the talking, speaking too fast, trying to rush out as much as he could before Frank went nuts, blew up.

He never blew up. Just sat there and listened and didn’t show a thing, and it took Grady back to those first few conversations in the house in Kenilworth and made his cowardice and corruption play through his eyes again, everything here so damn similar except that this time Frank was an adult and Grady was telling the truth.

“I know,” Grady said. “Frank, I know. You were a child, and one who’d suffered a loss, and we—”

“Turned me into a gun.”

“What?”

“That’s what you said he wanted to do. My father. That he’d raised me to kill. And while you were saying that about him, you were loading me up and pointing me at Devin.”

“We didn’t want
you
to go after him. We thought that you might know
something, and we needed to push the right buttons to see if . . .” Grady stopped talking and shook his head. “Shit, you’ve got me defending it now. I’m not going to. It’s like I said, Frank, I’m telling the truth now, and it had to start with you.”

Frank stood up and walked to the window, looked out at the lake. There was a flat-bottomed boat within sight, divers adjusting their masks before going back in, still searching for Atkins.

“You are a bastard,” Frank said, but it was without any venom at all, or even energy.

“I’m going to resign.”

“I don’t care about that. Why would I care if you kept your damn job?”

Grady didn’t say anything.

“I’d just turned eighteen,” Frank said, “when I called Ezra Ballard and begged him to go to Miami with me to kill Devin. Begged him. He said he wouldn’t, so I said I’d go alone, and he made a compromise with me. Said as long as Devin stayed down there, the hell with him, let him rot. But we’d never let him come back here. Never.”

Grady was sitting on the couch with his elbows on his knees, staring up at Frank, who hadn’t turned from the window, didn’t even seem to care that Grady was still in the room.

“Kudos,” Frank said, “on a job well done, Grady. You set out to convince me that Devin deserved retribution, get me fired up about it,
consumed
by it, right? Well, you got the job done. Yes, sir, you got it done.”

“I want you to know,” Grady began, but Frank continued talking as if he hadn’t heard him.

“I was
relieved
when Ezra told me the prick was coming back. Well, not at first. At first I had some sense. But then this fat bastard professor asked me if I’d write a memoir, and it was like fate, right, confirmation that there would be no getting away from this legacy, ever. Then I was relieved, Grady. I was absolutely relieved. Because I could finally welcome it.”

He stopped looking at the search boat then, turned to face Grady. “Devin was important to me. He gave me somebody to hate, somebody to blame, who wasn’t my father. I’m not saying he was enough for me to give the old man a pass, but he was enough to distract me. To redirect some things.”