When She Left: A Thriller, page 17
“How much money?” Ruby asked.
A night later he showed up with two laminating machines, small printers, specialized paper, a pair of razors, and walked Ruby and Tiffany through the process. When people came to the DMV to renew their driver’s licenses, they would keep the old ones. They’d bring those old IDs to their apartments and remove the security hologram with the razors. Then they’d fill out the new IDs with personal information and photos he’d provide, print it out on the thick stock, and carefully seal the old hologram to it. Run the fake ID through the laminator and let Gabe know when the batch was complete.
“These are for good people,” he said earnestly. Ruby didn’t believe him, but she also didn’t care.
The day after she and Tiffany had each created ten licenses, Gabe showed up at her door with a thick roll of twenty-dollar bills, and Ruby felt a deep excitement stir in her. It was the money, but it was more than that; it was her own lack of remorse. There was no difference to her about how the money had been obtained. It felt right for her to have it.
The money mattered and, over the next few years, mattered more than almost anything. Ruby had always lived just above her means but without extravagance. Every last dime she made went into the essentials for her and Jake to survive. Rent, clothes, food, a sitter for the days she had to work late, and, even then, she didn’t have enough money to cover any other expenses. She had a pair of credit cards that were close to the max, and she knew any unexpected expense could push her permanently, irreparably, into poverty.
But now, with the money Gabe gave her, Ruby finally made enough to pay a little on each of her credit cards; to buy better, healthier food at the grocery store; to make the repairs on her Toyota that had lingered for years; to buy her and Jake clothes from somewhere other than the consignment store.
And all she had to do was make a few dozen fake driver’s licenses every week.
“She was a better person than you were. You ruined her.”
“Should we stop doing this?” Tiffany asked.
“Why would we?” Ruby asked, honestly surprised.
“I mean, I was talking to someone at work about this, and it’s, like, a federal crime.”
“You were talking about this with someone?”
Tiffany gestured with a bottle of water. Lately she’d been drinking less wine. “I didn’t tell them about us. But someone down in Florida got arrested for doing the same thing. They’re going to prison.”
Ruby looked at her friend curiously. “Are you okay, Tiff?”
Tiffany stared uneasily into her lap. “I don’t feel great about doing this anymore. Especially since that conversation. And we don’t even need the money.”
“Are you serious?”
“You told me you paid off your credit cards. Started putting money in the bank. We got raises at work. You’re fine.”
Ruby was silent for a moment.
“What?” Tiffany prodded.
“I don’t think,” Ruby said, choosing her words carefully, “we have the same deal with money.”
“What’s that mean?”
Ruby could hear Tiffany’s emotions under her words. And she could sense the feelings stirring under her own. She took a sip of wine before she continued.
Lately she’d been drinking more wine.
“We’re different,” Ruby said. “That’s all. You have your family supporting you. I don’t.”
Tiffany’s cheeks pinked. “I need to work. I need a job.”
Ruby doubted that was true. “Okay, but Jake and I don’t have anyone to turn to. I was going broke before Gabe told us about this.” Something occurred to her. “Do you want to stop doing this just because you and Gabe aren’t seeing each other anymore? Is that why?”
Tiffany controlled her voice but bristled. “I told you, I don’t care who Gabe’s with now. I just don’t see what the big deal is with stopping, or why you want me to keep breaking the law. If you want to keep doing this, you can do it alone.”
“I don’t care about being alone.”
It felt like a long time before either woman spoke again.
“I should go,” Tiffany eventually said, and she stood.
“You were never there for anyone but yourself.”
“I was there for Jake. Always, even after he left.”
“He didn’t think so.”
Ruby walked over to the front door, broken by the truth in Eric’s words. It had been a mistake to come, to seek repentance without confession.
A few weeks later, Tiffany was assigned to a different DMV in Fairfax. Ruby heard she’d requested it.
They still lived doors away from each other, but Ruby took pains to avoid running into her. She knew Tiffany’s routine intimately—when the other woman went to the store, when she dropped Eric off for day care.
Seeing Tiffany would break her heart.
Even if Ruby resented her. Tiffany had made Ruby choose something terrible: either be lonely or impoverished. And neither of those were things Tiffany could understand.
Still, sometimes, Ruby wanted to walk down the hall, knock on Tiffany’s door, fall back into their old relationship.
But if she did, Tiffany probably would have asked if she was still working with Gabe.
And now Ruby was working for the people Gabe had worked for.
Gabe was gone, arrested and in prison somewhere. Ruby had found out when a man had come by her apartment that night, taken away the printer and lists of names. Asked her if she had any other materials relating to her work with the Winterses and, even after she told him no, ruthlessly searched her apartment, Jake staring as she stood by the door.
“And why are you even here?” Eric asked, staring at her as she stood by the door. “Jake’s hurt, and you just abandoned him again? Shouldn’t you be with him?”
“That’s enough,” Ruby told him abruptly, thunder in her tone. “I let you vent. But that’s enough. We’re not talking about that.”
Ruby hadn’t realized she was standing. Eric was taller than her, but, at this moment, she towered over him. His hands were up, shielding his face.
Had she struck him?
Ruby couldn’t remember.
She just knew that she was shaking, breathing rasps.
A knock on her door. Ruby opened it and Tiffany stormed inside.
“They searched my apartment!” Tiffany told her. “I haven’t worked with them for months, and they come in and search my apartment!”
Ruby had imagined talking to Tiffany so often that she was surprised how hard it was for her to speak. Her lost friend stood before her, eyes blazing.
“They had no right to do that!” Tiffany went on. “Eric was there!”
“Gabe got arrested. They’re making sure, if he talks, there’s no evidence the cops can find. It’s keeping us safe.”
“That’s not what they’re doing. They’re covering their asses.”
“I don’t know.”
Tiffany stopped fuming, seemed to gain a touch of control. She looked at Ruby, and Ruby almost cherished that moment, their eyes locked, the way they would when they shared something important about their past or laughed or the excitement they felt when they first saw each other.
But that moment ended when Tiffany asked, “How can you put Jake in this kind of danger?”
“I’m doing this for Jake,” Ruby said.
“You’re going to get him killed if you keep . . .”
“You don’t understand!” Ruby’s voice had risen and she didn’t care. “You don’t get to tell me how my life is wrong and evil and I’m hurting my son when you have a rich family. You played with the Winterses, and you don’t understand that there are people who can’t just play. At any moment you can go down south and have three meals and a bed, and I can’t do that! I have to fight for it.”
Tiffany trembled as she spoke. “I am going back home,” she said slowly, each word like a driven nail. “And you should leave before I do.”
“Why? What does that mean?”
But Ruby knew what that meant. Tiffany was going to the cops.
The next afternoon a car rushed down the street as Tiffany was unlocking her driver’s side door, Eric sitting in the back seat. Ruby hadn’t known what the Winterses were going to do, but she’d known they were going to do something.
She heard the car’s impact. Shouts.
Ruby knelt and wept.
And wondered why she was weeping.
She’d done what was necessary. She’d kept Tiffany from getting her arrested, from separating Ruby from Jake.
They’d hurt her, and they’d helped her, these men.
These men who created and shaped the world in which Ruby lived.
A day later a man showed up, with money and a phone that he installed. Codes that he taught her.
“You good?” he asked her before he left.
Ruby opened the door but stopped before she stepped through.
“I was wondering . . . ,” she began and faltered, that thunder gone. “Before I go, can you tell me what Jake’s like now?”
Eric took a moment to answer.
“He’s a good man,” he said. “Nothing like you.”
Oh, Eric, there is no good. Or evil.
Only the sword.
My voice echoes through this winter wasteland, and with it I dispel shadows.
There is the Lord, and He is God, and He is the Devil, and He is us. And we are sin, and we are blessed.
And so none are pure.
I whisper my parables to the man with the sword, and he strikes down this world of sin, dragging his scythe through fields of dead wheat. I am the harbinger of death and this world is a tomb of bones.
And mine eyes have seen the true coming, the Lord standing on the edge of oceans, holding the bleeding spear that impaled His son. And on that day men will run, and men will weep, and men will devour each other.
He will strike us all down.
And all that remains will be all that ever was.
The word and the sword.
CHAPTER TWENTY
LUCKY
Confronting Marybeth had gone, even in Lucky’s most optimistic assessment, catastrophically wrong.
It was obvious that it wasn’t going to go well from the moment Marybeth returned home from school to find Lucky and Renee waiting for her in the kitchen, presenting a united front. Lucky had started by showing her the video from the camera outside William’s home.
“You’re spying on me?” Marybeth asked, incredulous.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t have opened with that,” Renee murmured.
Lucky realized his mistake. This was the tactic he used when questioning people, presenting them with their guilt to throw them off-balance for the remainder of the interrogation.
That hadn’t been the right approach with Marybeth.
“What the hell, Dad?” she’d asked and turned to Renee. “Did you know about this?”
“We were worried about you,” Renee said. “When your father thought you might be seeing William, he put a camera outside his house to make sure.”
“That’s an invasion of privacy!”
“How?” Lucky asked.
“You can’t just stalk someone!”
“It’s legal to install a camera or any sort of nonintrusive monitoring device outside of a residential property,” Lucky explained, “provided that a reasonable sense of privacy isn’t inhibited.”
“It’s creepy that you know that,” Marybeth replied, and she turned to Renee. “Right? That’s creepy.”
“A little,” Renee admitted. “But that’s not important. You can’t keep seeing him.”
“Mom!”
“I’m sorry.”
“William and I weren’t even doing anything!” Marybeth fumed. “Just hanging out. We never even . . . he wanted to take it slow.”
“I don’t believe that,” Lucky said.
“Oh, fuck off, Dad.”
Silence hit the room.
“You can’t talk to us like that,” Renee said incredulously.
Lucky could tell Marybeth wanted to relent, but she couldn’t let herself apologize. “But it’s okay for Dad to spy on me? To put a camera outside someone’s house?”
Both Renee and Marybeth looked toward him, waiting for his response.
But Lucky didn’t want to speak, didn’t trust himself to say the right thing. He was offended, of course, but something else had been held in Marybeth’s retort that was even more distressing. It was the maturity in the insult, her push away.
The loss of his child.
“Dad?”
Lucky left the kitchen. Kept walking as Renee called, “Lucky!” Headed out the front door.
He hadn’t been sure where he was going to go when he climbed into his Grand Cherokee. He just wanted to drive.
Lucky kept the radio off as he drove out of Springfield, past Alexandria, past the National Harbor, each location jarring something from his memory. Springfield, where he’d driven Marybeth to day care every morning. Alexandria, where he and his daughter had walked around Mount Vernon one hot August afternoon when she’d had a week between summer camp and school, and he’d taken the day off from work to be with her. The National Harbor, where they’d ridden a giant Ferris wheel, and he’d pointed out the monuments of DC.
He was in Maryland now, and Lucky always found it peculiar how Virginia and Maryland were so closely connected, yet so foreign to each other. The neighboring states had a natural rivalry, and Lucky had sold enough homes to longtime residents of Virginia to know that most of them would never consider living in Maryland. And he knew the same was true of Marylanders. But Lucky secretly liked a lot about Virginia’s sibling state. He drove past exits for Annapolis and Baltimore and had fond memories of trips his family had taken, wandering around Baltimore’s wondrous aquarium and touristy inner harbor, visiting Annapolis once for the Fourth of July, Marybeth’s face gazing up at fireworks. The cities seemed to have greater demarcation than northern Virginia’s, separated by long forests and stretches of road until they finally appeared over a crest of highway, the glittering skylines. “That’s where we’re going!” Marybeth had declared, back when she was the age that merely being with him was exciting and fun for her.
Lucky rounded the road past Baltimore’s exit, and another memory tugged at him. Not of Marybeth but Seth, the young killer he’d apprenticed. The day he’d finished training Seth, had taught him the importance of subtlety and silence, instilled in him the way the Winterses wanted death to appear natural. And Seth had asked Lucky if he was going to partner with him. Lucky had given one final lesson. “I need a moment,” he’d said, and he’d left the young man sitting in that Baltimore coffee shop, slipped out the door and driven off.
Lucky already had a family.
He drove past the high-priced neighborhoods of Chevy Chase and Bethesda, towns that bordered the district of DC and were considered some of the wealthiest in the nation. Recent news reports claimed that the Winterses had family who lived in these cities, but that hadn’t cast a pall over the area. If anything, like controversy always does, it lent a mystique to the region, particularly since those cities tended to be closed off and reserved, constantly and carefully guarding their secrets.
An hour and a half later, Lucky finished rounding the beltway, pulled back into his driveway, pressed the garage door opener. Drove his car inside and shut off the engine. Walked into the laundry room that, back when Marybeth played soccer, had also been used as a mudroom, every weekend the floor covered with her discarded dirty gear.
A woman waited for him in the kitchen.
“Hello, Lucky,” she said.
Lucky stood still, kept his face impassive despite his surprise. But his mind was working fast. The gun hidden in the attic. The other one in the backyard office. The knife rack behind her. Her empty hands clasped in front of her. Renee and Marybeth.
But he didn’t move, because he knew someone else was in the room.
“Bianca,” Lucky said.
“She’s not Bianca,” the other woman behind him replied. Lucky could almost sense the gun in her hand. “I am.”
“Adriana,” Lucky corrected himself.
“All these years . . . ,” Bianca Rusu said, walking around him, joining her twin sister on the other side of the kitchen counter.
“. . . and you still get us confused,” Adriana finished the sentence.
“Not like we spend a lot of time together,” Lucky replied. Bianca stood next to her seated twin, her hand resting on the countertop. They each wore dark tops, thin hoodies, with their blonde hair pulled back into ponytails and pressed through the gaps in their black baseball caps.
“When did we meet you?” Adriana mused.
“And was it just once?” Bianca asked.
“It had to be.”
“He’s not very memorable.”
Lucky remembered exactly when he’d met the twins. It had been almost a decade ago, when they’d first started working for the Winterses, and Lucky had been sent to clean up the bloody mess they’d left behind. Adriana and Bianca Rusu had come from some eastern European country—Bulgaria? Romania? Lucky could never remember—pretending to be sex-trafficked teens, but they were actually working for the traffickers to keep the other women with them in line. Upon meeting Victor Winters, they’d decided to kill the men they were working for and take over the operation themselves. But their tactics were excessive, even for the Winterses, and they’d instead been given a job as enforcers and then assassins.
Lucky had been called to a home in Annapolis—a large waterfront house with its own pool and a separate guesthouse, very nice—and that’s where he’d found the man the Rusu twins had murdered. But they hadn’t just murdered him. He was icily dismembered, his limbs spread throughout the property, head placed on a lawn chair looking out over the bay, a leg standing on its own in the kitchen, an arm on the bathroom floor, the thumb poised in an ironic thumbs-up gesture. There was a dichotomy that struck Lucky as unpleasantly as a raspy alarm, refusing to quiet. When he’d been called to clean up the mess the Winterses had assumed the twins left behind, Lucky had expected to see a sloppy murder, puddles of blood, the kind of inexperienced killing done in rage.
