When She Left: A Thriller, page 5
“Dammit.”
“That’s what I said.” Melissa paused for a moment. “But it’s weird. I was happy when he was here. Like . . . I hoped he’d arrest us.”
“Why?”
“We killed those people at the diner.”
“We didn’t kill them.”
“They’d be alive if we hadn’t been there.”
Jake didn’t know how to respond. “Where’d you get the glasses and hat?”
“A closet down below.”
“You going to keep them?”
“They’re cute.” As if that answered his question.
Jake waited a moment before he spoke again, worried about how Melissa would react to what he was going to tell her.
“I called Eric.”
Melissa yanked off the sunglasses. “What?!”
“I’m sorry,” Jake said sincerely. “It was a mistake. I didn’t think about it. I’m sorry.”
“Jesus, Jake.”
“I know, I just wanted to talk with him. To make sure he was okay.”
Melissa still looked upset but didn’t press her irritation. Jake loved her for that, the way she always seemed to understand his impulses and inhibitions, even now. “What did he say?”
“He told me the Winterses asked him about us,” Jake replied, “but Eric didn’t say anything. I’m hoping they give up.”
“Chris won’t be happy until we’re both dead,” Melissa said simply.
Jake didn’t know how to respond.
Again, failure whispered.
“I moved my car.” Jake hoped this would offer some reassurance. “Parked it off the side of some dirt road. But we can’t risk driving anywhere, and we can’t take a train or plane with everyone looking for us. I figure we stay here tonight and find someplace new tomorrow.”
“I guess we should.” Melissa pulled off the hat, examined how it was woven. “Had you ever seen someone die before?”
Melissa’s question was a shovel plunged into his ribs. She kept talking before he could reply.
“I didn’t know it would be like that, with that much blood. It was like blood was being pulled out of their bodies.”
Jake didn’t respond.
“I wish I hadn’t seen them. I don’t ever want to see your pictures.”
Jake nodded. He couldn’t look at them either.
“It feels like we’re corrupt,” Melissa said. “Too dirty to ever be clean.”
“I’m sorry,” he told her quietly. “I’m sorry I got you into this. That I brought you to that diner . . .”
“I shouldn’t have let you stop.”
Jake walked to the other side of the deck and looked over the railing at the swarm of dry boats.
“Should we go back?” he asked. “Try the cops?”
“We have to run. That’s the only way we’ll be safe.”
Jake turned toward Melissa, but he didn’t look at her.
“Do you want to run without me?” he asked.
“No. Do you?”
“It’d feel like drowning,” he told her. “And when I feel like I’m going to drown, I just want to hold you.”
“So you’d pull me down with you?”
“Well, yeah, but . . . romantically.”
Jake explored the warehouse. A dozen skylights were spread throughout the ceiling, the late-year sunshine straining through dirty glass. A locked door led to an office from which, Jake assumed, the large bay doors could be opened. He went through the other boats, hunting for food, drinks, clothes, anything they could use. All he found were cases of water, some scuba diving gear he figured they could pawn, heavy boating equipment he didn’t understand.
Jake walked back to their boat, a case of water balanced on his shoulder.
“Hello?”
A man’s voice.
Jake stayed statue still, trying to control his breathing, listening hard.
He set the case down.
“Hello?” That voice again. Older and quaking. Scared. “Anyone here?”
A grunt. A crunch of glass.
Someone had climbed in through that broken window.
Jake touched the gun that was still awkwardly stuffed in his hoodie’s pouch.
Footsteps approached, unsure and slow.
Jake pulled the gun free, held it unnaturally in his hand. He’d only fired a gun once before, when he was in his early teens and a friend had taken him into some swamp in Alexandria, and they’d found a deer’s dead body and filled it with bullets, the animal’s long black eyes staring until, finally, Jake was too shaken to shoot anymore.
“Jake?”
Melissa’s voice from inside the boat, probably still in the bedroom, wondering where he had gone.
That man’s footsteps again. Quicker now. Coming toward them. Following Melissa’s voice.
“Where’d you go?” Melissa called out.
Jake slipped behind the yacht. He walked around it, the bow that nearly touched the warehouse’s back wall. Hurried past the long side with “The Constellation” painted on it in red and blue.
Jake circled the boat until he saw an elderly man, a security guard in tan pants and a red polo, staring up the ladder. No gun or weapon on him. Nothing but a flashlight in his hand. His back turned.
Oblivious that Jake was walking toward him.
“Um, hi,” Jake said.
The guard’s shoulders hunched like an arrow had suddenly dug between them. He yelped and turned, still in a flinch.
His frightened gaze didn’t leave Jake’s gun.
“Who are . . .” The guard’s voice faded, and he tried again. “Who are . . .”
“Turn around,” Jake told him. He heard the quaver in his own voice. “Please.”
“Don’t,” the guard whispered. “You don’t have to.”
Jake pushed the other man’s chest with his free hand, the shove harder than he’d expected. The old man stumbled, caught himself before he fell. Jake almost reached out to steady him.
“Jake?”
He and the guard both looked up. They saw Melissa on the deck, staring down.
“Help me,” the guard said to her. “Please.”
“What do we do?” Jake asked her.
“He’s seen us,” Melissa said. “He’ll tell them about us.”
Her voice broke as she spoke, the same sudden anguish on her face as when she’d stabbed that man at the diner.
Jake’s hand trembled as his fingertip touched the trigger.
CHAPTER FIVE
LUCKY
Lucky peered through binoculars as dawn broke over the Heartbreak Diner. The parking lot was empty, signs on the window announced that the diner was temporarily closed. Lucky wondered if the closure would be permanent. When he was a kid, a murder at a business meant that the business could never continue.
But times changed.
He locked his car and walked across the parking lot. It would have been easy enough to sneak inside, but there was no need to draw attention to himself. Lucky often found that a direct approach was best in most situations. And if he was stopped and asked, he could produce the business card that identified him as a licensed private investigator from the sixty-hour course he’d completed years ago. Not that he had any interest in working as an investigator, but it did help when accessing crime scenes.
To know what cops were looking for.
He’d left his house at 4:00 a.m. for the drive, a time of day that—ideally—ensured no one else would be here. Renee thought he was scouting properties somewhere outside northern Virginia, and she’d sleepily murmured a goodbye after he kissed her on the forehead. She was used to his early mornings and late nights.
Lucky thought about that forehead kiss as he drove here. It had been habit, reflex conditioned over years.
So much of his marriage consisted of an intimacy that had become casual. Quick kisses. Monthly lovemaking. Even his appearance was intentionally unmemorable—light-brown hair always parted to the right, forever cleanly shaven, no tattoos or other markings. He was seemingly designed to be forgotten.
Should life have been less casual?
Had that been his mistake?
Lucky forced himself not to think about that, tried the door to the diner. Locked. He glanced around, pulled out his lockpick, slipped on a pair of thin gloves. Fortunately, the lock looked new—like people, old locks often aged into stubbornness. He used a tension wrench and pick, popped the tumbler like a held breath suddenly exhaled.
At this point in Lucky’s life, picking a lock was as easy as using a key.
He opened the door, stepped inside. Switched on the lights.
Lucky walked up the small aisle between the counter and booths. Of course, the bodies and blood and markings from the investigation were gone, but Lucky wouldn’t feel satisfied until he saw the crime scene with his own eyes. He went from one end of the diner to the other, peering under each booth, looking up at the ceiling. Pushed open the door leading to the kitchen, walked around the smudged steel ovens and refrigerators, the crumb-filled counters that had yet to be cleaned. The seating area of the diner seemed undisturbed. The kitchen, in contrast, looked like someone had rushed out.
Curious, Lucky thought, that the waitress had tried to leave through the restaurant and not the back door.
But panicked people rarely made the best decisions; Lucky had witnessed many of these mistakes. Victims running out the wrong door, pulling open an empty drawer when they went for a gun, hiding halfway under their bed, hopelessly praying with their eyes shut as he approached.
He found nothing but stains in the microwave, a cold tinfoil-covered pan of something unidentifiable in one of the ovens, Saran-wrapped bowls in the fridge.
A beep from the phone in his right pocket.
Lucky pulled it out, opened the WatchFull app, and his screen filled with an image of the front of William McKenna’s house.
The lump in his throat throbbed.
Lucky had gone to William’s neighborhood weeks earlier, parked a few streets away from his house and loped through the woods. Climbed a tree across from William’s home and attached a lipstick-size camera to a high branch.
The same technique he used when tracking someone he was going to kill.
Lucky stared into his phone as the front door opened and William walked to his car, the way he did every morning at this exact time. Wearing a dark-blue business suit, leather satchel slung over his shoulder. William opened the door to his silver BMW, the house and car relics from William’s divorce years ago from a wealthy woman, and tossed the satchel inside. Lucky had learned long ago that people, often unconsciously, followed the same pattern every single day. And William’s pattern was to leave at approximately six fifteen in the morning for Eastwise Private School.
Lucky kept staring down into his phone as he stepped back into the dining area.
“Freeze!”
He stopped as if cold water had suddenly splashed his face.
For a crazy, confused moment, he wondered if William McKenna was here.
“Don’t say freeze.” Lucky realized there were two men in the dining room, both focused on him.
“Hey, Lucky.”
It took a moment, Lucky still coming down from surprise, his mind adjusting like he’d walked from a dark room into light.
“Chris Winters?” Lucky asked.
Victor Winters had been a glowering mountain of a man, a giant force of nature. His nephew was markedly different. Shorter and slim, hair that nearly covered his eyes, arrogance in his expression.
And a shiny white bandage on top of his head.
The only similarity, Lucky noticed, between Victor and Chris was a sense of lurking danger. Like wading into ocean waters that turn darker and colder the farther you swim.
“This is Marley,” Chris said, indicating his associate, a squarish muscular man with a cold gaze. Marley just stared at Lucky and pushed open the long black jacket he wore. Lucky saw a pair of pistols with silver grips holstered on his waist.
“How’d you know I was here?” Lucky asked.
“There’s a reason we give you a phone.”
Marley walked past Lucky, stood directly behind him, and Lucky fought the urge to turn.
“You’re an early riser, Lucky,” Chris said. “I hate that. But Marley here told me what my uncle used to tell him: successful men don’t wait for the world to start; successful men start the world.”
“Good advice,” Lucky said, still bothered by Marley standing behind him, those twin silver pistols. His shoulder blades tightened.
“So this job,” Chris went on. “Things changed. You got an order to bring the girl in alive, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Dig two graves.”
A touch of eagerness in Chris’s voice at that. Lucky could tell he’d wanted to say that line.
“What changed?” Lucky asked.
Instead of answering, Chris walked over to a booth. Looked like he wanted to sit but thought better of it.
Marley stayed behind Lucky.
“You worked freelance for my uncle for years, right?” Chris said. “But you never wanted more than that? Never wanted to get . . . an employee badge?”
“No.”
Chris seemed to be waiting for Lucky to say more.
Lucky stayed quiet. He never told cops or crooks more than they needed to know.
“Everything fell apart after my uncle was killed,” Chris said, and Lucky saw a moment of vulnerability in the younger man, that arrogance turned indecisive, a young lion with a limp. “We’re still putting everything back together.”
Lucky had heard stories about Victor Winters’s death, the dark rumors of his murder coming at the hands of a rival crime organization, a mysterious vigilante, a secret law enforcement unit that went beyond the books, a group of trafficked women who had finally fought back.
Or a member of his family.
People always whispered around the dead.
“And now my other uncle is out here, from Vegas,” Chris said. “You met Frank yet? Slim guy? Wears yellow glasses like he’s from the seventies?”
Lucky shook his head. He heard Marley breathing behind him, imagined he could feel the other man’s breath on his neck.
“He’s out here because after Victor died, no one knew what to do. We lost people. Lost money.”
Lucky’s phone shivered, but he didn’t dare move and risk surprising Marley.
Chris was still talking. Lucky tried to listen, despite his utter certainty that his phone was alerting him to movement at William’s house. Maybe William had returned home with Renee, his morning plans changed because of Lucky’s early departure, the two of them hurriedly seizing a quick opportunity for sex.
For love.
“Too much has happened,” Chris was saying. “Our men dying, some just disappearing. Suppliers worried they aren’t going to get paid. Territory being lost. It’s time I took over, brought the Winterses back to the place where my uncle had us.”
Another notification from his phone. Lucky imagined the screen showing Renee’s car parked, the driver’s side door hanging open in her rush, one of her shoes kicked off and left on the porch, the shape of her leg as William lifted her skirt, the two of them embracing in his open front door.
“And Chris Winters can’t do that if everyone knows he got cucked and knocked out.”
That distracted Lucky. “Wait,” he said, confused. “I thought you’re Chris Winters?”
“I am.” Chris looked just as confused.
“The third person thing threw me off.”
“I told you, boss,” Marley said to Chris, still behind Lucky. “It’s weird when you do that.”
“My uncle did it!”
Nobody would have dared correct him, Lucky thought.
“Anyway,” Chris went on. “We don’t need some outsider from Vegas taking over, even if he is family. Chris . . . I need our soldiers to know who’s in charge. So I need to make an example out of Melissa.”
Lucky noticed the burn in Chris’s eyes as he spoke, the flush in his cheeks, the tremble as he said her name. Hate from scorned love.
Lucky didn’t care about Chris’s youth. He’d accepted that, as he aged, the people he worked for would be younger. But in that moment, Chris was suddenly a kid, impulsive and rash, a look on his face similar to his daughter’s when Lucky confronted her about the parties.
“Her name’s Melissa?” Lucky asked.
“Melissa Cruz,” Chris said, that venom still there. “She ran off with some photographer. Brained me on the way out the door.” Chris touched the edge of the white bandage on his head. “We’re here to give you photos, information, anything else you need. No one escapes Winter.”
A moment of silence.
“Is that a new motto?” Lucky asked. “There’s a slogan now?”
“Do you like it?” Chris asked.
“Well . . . I mean . . .”
“It’s not great,” Marley offered. “I told you that, boss. It sounds like Game of Thrones or something.”
“Honestly, I’m not in love with it,” Lucky added.
Chris’s expression darkened. “No one escapes Winter, or Winters, whatever,” he said, his voice firm. “And killing Melissa is our priority.”
“Got it.”
But Lucky knew this effort was misguided. If Chris was worried his men were having doubts, taking revenge on his ex-girlfriend wasn’t going to reassure them.
Lucky remembered a homeowner last year who, rather than update his primary bathroom, had opted to spend money on landscaping. Lucky had attempted to convince him that the yard—which admittedly needed work—wasn’t going to deter buyers, especially once they got inside the house. But this homeowner, an advertising executive, had insisted, and the house had finally sold, but for less than Lucky knew it was worth.
Sometimes, when success is small, it’s a sign of larger failure.
“I got the message that I’m not working alone,” Lucky said. “How many others are on this job?”
