Live to Tell (7 page)

“To Tuscany? No. How about Morocco?”

“That’s not in Europe,” she points out.

“No, but I’ve always wanted to see it.”

“Rio.”

“Hawaii,” he counters.

“Some deserted island in the Caribbean? Or we could just stay here. Forever.”

“That,” he agrees, “would be amazing.”

“Let’s do it.”

Seeing the serious expression in her brown eyes, he says, “Wait—you’re serious?”

“No. But let’s pretend I am, just for tonight. Let’s talk about all the things we’d do if we never had to go back.”

“Deal.” He pulls her closer. “Maybe we can even
do
one of the things we’d do a whole lot more if we never had to go back.”

She laughs silkily. “Is that a proposition?”

“Hell, yes.” Grinning as she reaches up to untie the halter of her sundress, Nick decides that life is just about perfect.

CHAPTER FIVE

J
ay-Rod, his teammates called him, back when he was playing third base for his high school team on Long Island. Of course, Jason Thomas Rodriguez is no relation to the Yankees’ A-Rod, but no harm in letting people assume so. Not that many people did—unless he managed to mention it.

Like many a teenage athlete, he’d always dreamed of playing in the majors. And like the vast majority of them, he didn’t even come close. Flubbed a minor league tryout after graduation, and that was that. Jay-Rod gave way to Jason again—just another screwed-up kid from a lower-middle-class broken home.

Dream over.

Nightmare begins.

For a few years, he got himself into and out of trouble, onto and off of the streets. Drugs, petty crime. Then he met Irena, fell in love, cleaned up his act.

He found an affordable studio apartment in Queens, landed a job in Manhattan—custodial work at Grand Central Terminal, but still.

Now he goes by JT, having distanced himself from both the disappointed athlete and the street thug he’d once been. These days, he lives his life on the up and up—most of the time.

With a twinge of guilt, he pats his pocket to make sure the folded piece of paper is still there.

What he did wasn’t really
wrong
, though. In fact, it was actually kind of heroic. He imagines himself telling Irena about it when he sees her. She has a soft spot for little kids. Wait till she hears how he helped a total stranger get his dying daughter’s favorite toy back from whoever snagged it from the lost and found.

Heroics aside, no one in his right mind would have turned down the offer to make such easy money. Especially since JT had been told he’d be paid a token amount for his efforts to find the toy even if he failed.

But he hadn’t. It had taken all of two minutes for JT to let himself into the closed lost and found office and find the record of the person who had mistakenly claimed the damned thing.

Mission accomplished, easy breezy. The ultra-organized lost and found photocopies the driver’s license of everyone who claims lost property, attaching it to the original claim form and filing away a hard copy just ripe for the taking.

Now all JT has to do is go over to the pub, hand over the photocopy, and collect his money.

Exiting the terminal on the west side, he’s hit with a blast of muggy August air laced with the faint stench of stagnant gutter water from a late day thunderstorm. A few stray commuters hurry along Vanderbilt Avenue, but midtown is relatively quiet at this hour.

Passing a hand-in-hand couple, JT thinks wistfully of Irena, who’s probably in bed by now. Her breakfast shift at an Astoria Boulevard diner begins at four.

Someday, they’ll be able to see more of each other. Someday, when Irena has graduated from Queensborough Community College and no longer has to work two jobs just to pay her tuition. Someday, when she’s his wife.

His pulse quickens at the thought of the diamond ring he’s been saving up to buy. With his next paycheck and the extra cash he’s about to pocket, they’ll be engaged by Labor Day.

He crosses the narrow avenue and walks up two blocks, toward the pub. Turning west, he sees that the sidewalk between here and Madison becomes a plywood-framed tunnel, protection from the construction zone on an overhead skyscraper.

Yeah. Like some flimsy strips of wood will keep pedestrians safe from a falling crane or steel beam. Things drop from the sky all the time here—construction equipment, air-conditioning units, suicides—but native New Yorkers take that sort of thing in stride.

His footsteps echoing through the deserted wooden walkway, JT notes that the overhead bulbs meant to light the area are burned out. Figures.

He wipes a trickle of sweat from his brow, thinking that a cold beer would go down easily right about now. Maybe this guy he’s meeting at the pub will buy him one, in addition to paying him for his efforts.

If not, maybe I’ll just treat myself.

“Excuse me?”

JT glances over his shoulder to see a beefy-looking stranger coming up through the shadows behind him. After he looks around to see that there’s no one else in the walkway, JT’s street smarts kick in. He takes a wary step backward. “Yeah?”

“I’m supposed to give you this in exchange for some information.” The guy flashes a fistful of green.

“But—”

“Yeah, I know, my brother was supposed to meet you over at the pub…”

Brother? Momentarily confused, JT thinks of the guy he met earlier. He was on the short side, wiry, balding.

This one is built like a bull. A bull with a hand that’s now fanning a bunch of hundred-dollar bills—a lot more than JT was supposed to be paid. His eyes widen.

“But,” the bull continues, “he couldn’t make it. Had to rush over to the hospital.”

Oh geez. JT wonders if the brother’s kid is going to live long enough to see her favorite toy.

“So he sent me to close the deal for him.”

Close the deal?

JT laughs nervously. This guy makes it sound almost like they’re doing something shady here.

Which you are
, he reminds himself. But in the grand scheme of things, considering his own past, this isn’t so bad. He’s not hurting anyone—he’s helping.

“Did you get the information for my brother?”

JT nods, again checking the street, making sure there’s no one around to see the exchange and mistake it for a drug deal or something.

Coast is clear.

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the piece of paper.

The guy unfolds it and looks at the photocopied driver’s license while JT looks at all those hundred-dollar bills, almost within his reach. Yeah, he’ll definitely go get himself a cold one after this. Maybe a couple, to celebrate the unexpected windfall.

Giving a satisfied nod, the guy folds the paper again and tucks it into his pocket. When his hand emerges, it isn’t empty.

Too late, JT spots the pistol. Before he can react, he feels its hard nose probing point-blank against his chest…

And then he feels nothing at all.

Lauren wipes a trickle of sweat from her forehead as she carries a glass of ice water into the living room. She stepped out of a tepid shower less than ten minutes ago and she’s wearing only a thin baby doll nightgown, but it’s impossible to cool off tonight.

Exhausted, she sinks onto the living room couch, directly in front of the rotating floor fan. The blades stir the sticky air but don’t cool it, and there’s not a breath of breeze through the screen at the open window.

Chauncey, lying on the rug, opens one eye to look at her, then closes it again as though he doesn’t have the energy for anything more strenuous.

That’s why they call this the dog days of August, Lauren decides, and yawns.

She should probably just go up to bed.

But that would feel, in some strange way, like giving up. In bed before nine o’clock on a Friday night?

No way. She isn’t giving in yet, no matter how tired she is.

Anyway, the house is cooler downstairs.

Yeah—maybe ninety-five degrees compared to ninety-six upstairs.

This is stupid. When she was married, she had no qualms about turning in early. Nothing to prove, not even to herself.

It isn’t just the thought of her ex-husband living it up on an island tonight with his new girlfriend while Lauren sits here drinking tap water and sweating…

Come on—yes it is. It is just that, and you know it.

Thank God this summer is almost over. It’s time she exited the pity party and reclaimed her life.

Last year at this time, she was wistfully thinking about all the home improvement projects she could do if she just had a couple of kid-free days. Nothing major, but over the years, she taught herself how to paint and wallpaper and slipcover…

She’s no longer in the mood to do any of that. Why bother when they might end up selling the house? The only smart thing to do would be to pare down their possessions in anticipation of a move—and Trilby’s reminded her several times that she needs tag sale donations.

Tomorrow
, she decides.
A rainy Saturday is perfect for cleaning out drawers and closets.

Lauren sets the dripping water glass on a coaster and picks up a magazine. The pages feel damp—all the paper in the house feels damp at this time of year. She leafs past an article about weight loss, an interview with a country singer, a list of clever household hints, most of which seem to involve baking soda.

Bored, she exchanges the magazine for the remote and turns on the television, wondering if there’s anything on worth watching.

Then again, even if there is, she’s not sure she possesses the patience or stamina tonight to be enlightened, or educated, or even entertained. Maybe she should just turn off the TV and read a good—

“Mommy!”

Lauren sighs. Not again.

There had been a time when she’d have leaped to her feet at the sound of Sadie shouting from upstairs long after she’d been tucked into bed. A time when Chauncey, too, would have come alert at the sound, no matter how hot it was.

Those days are over. Now it’s routine for Lauren to be regularly summoned to Sadie’s bedside for everything from a knock-knock joke to a mosquito bite that needs maternal scratching.

“Mommy!”

Chauncey doesn’t even bother to open one eye.

“I’m down here, sweetie,” she calls back and adds—for what feels like the hundredth time tonight—“Go to sleep!”

Aiming the remote, she clicks through a couple of channels. There must be something…

“Mommy!”

Some nights are worse than others. On a good night, Lauren has to climb the stairs to Sadie’s room only a couple of times. On a bad one, it can be a dozen or more.

This has been a bad one.

She closes her eyes wearily and calls, “What’s the matter now, Sadie?”

“I need you!”

Yes. She does. She needs me.

Sadie’s just a little tiny girl, afraid of the dark and the bogeyman and, tonight, of lions and tigers and bears and the Wicked Witch of the West.

The Wizard of Oz
scared the living daylights out of poor Sadie.

She needs to watch more age-appropriate television.

No, she needs to watch less television, period.

She needs her mommy.

Her daddy, too.

This is
so
not fair.

She tosses the remote aside, steps over Chauncey, opens the doggy gate, and heads up the stairs.

The small pub off Vanderbilt Avenue is conveniently located within spitting distance of Grand Central Terminal’s west entrance. Earlier, the bar was jammed with commuters. But happy hour is long over, and the crowd has thinned considerably, leaving Byron Gregson with a clear view of the entrance from his barstool perch.

He checks his watch, then looks again at the door. Still no sign of the man Byron knows only as JT, who said he’d be here twenty minutes ago, with or without the information.

If he brings what Byron asked for, JT will be rewarded well for his efforts.

Even if he doesn’t, Byron promised to give him a token tip—his way of ensuring that he won’t needlessly spend an entire night sitting here nursing ridiculously expensive draft beer, waiting for someone who can’t deliver and has no incentive to show up.

But maybe the tip wasn’t incentive enough. Again, he looks at his watch.

“Another Guinness?” the bartender asks, swirling his rag across the polished wooden surface of the bar, close to Byron’s nearly empty mug.

Again, he checks the door.

“Sure,” he tells the bartender with resignation. “Another Guinness.”

“It’s hard to believe New York is out there somewhere,” Nick comments, sitting beside Beth on the sand and gazing out at the western sky, where the water remains tinged with faint pink traces of a spectacular sunset.

“Maybe it’s not out there.”

“What?”

“Maybe something happened to the rest of the world since we’ve been here, and all that’s left is this island.”

Nick looks at her. “What about our kids?”

“You’re right. Bad fantasy.” Even in the twilight, her eyes remain masked behind oversize Chanel shades. “But you have to admit, it’s hard to think about the city right now—hot, steamy, smelly. Cabs honking and construction noise and all those people rushing around, sweating in their business clothes, when… I mean, look at us.”

Yes. Look at them. Barefoot and tanned, wearing just bathing suits, lounging on a remote beach on the island’s easternmost tip. Look at them, a world away from the city and from judgmental small-town eyes.

Beth sighs and leans back, elbows propped in the sand. “Oh well. You know what they say. Everything has its price.”

“You got that right.” Nick lowers his sunglasses again and admires her flat stomach from behind the lenses.

Lauren never wore a bikini, but if she had, she wouldn’t look like this.

Okay, that’s not fair. Lauren looked—looks—pretty damned good. Even after Sadie. In fact, the last few times he’s seen her, he’s noticed how thin she’s become.

But she doesn’t look glamorous-thin, the way Beth does. No, Lauren looks more like she’s wasting away.

Nick himself is at least partially to blame for that, he supposes.

But who wants to spend the last night of a glorious vacation on a guilt trip?

Not me
.

“So what do you think? Should we go into the water?” he asks Beth.

“In a couple of minutes. I kind of like sitting here watching the sun set.”

“So do I, but we can see it from the water, too.”

“You do know that dusk is prime feeding time for sharks.”

“I do.” He grins. “But I’ll take my chances. I just don’t feel like I might die tonight.”

For some reason, a conversation he once had with Lauren flashes into Nick’s head. He seems to recall that it, too, took place at the tail end of a vacation—it must have, because he remembers that they were in the car, stuck in traffic on the thruway.

No…the Jersey Turnpike.

Would you rather die a slow death and have the chance to say good-bye, or would you prefer to die in an accident and never know what hit you?