When She Left: A Thriller, page 6
“The Rusu twins. You. Your boy Seth.”
Your boy Seth.
Lucky tried to keep his expression impassive.
“Why so many?” Lucky asked. “Any one of us could find them.”
“And now maybe you’ll find them faster.”
Lucky didn’t like that answer. More people in the field meant more chances for mistakes, loud clumsy incidents like the one at this diner. Victor Winters would have done things differently.
“I thought the twins were out of the area,” Lucky said. He knew of the Rusu twins, Bianca and Adriana. Pretty and blonde and from some eastern European country. Came to the states posing as sex-trafficked teens, but they were secretly working with the trafficker to keep the other women in line. Once that trafficker was killed the twins went on their own, and eventually ended up with the Winterses.
“The twins go where the work is,” Chris told him. His sense of malice, a bullying sort of mischief, was back. “Speaking of that, you going to call Seth, work with him on this?”
“No.”
“He said the same thing about you.”
Lucky didn’t reply.
“I want to give you something, Lucky.”
It sounded like a threat. Lucky’s poker face was starting to ache.
“What’s that?”
“A promise,” Chris said. “You do this job, you take out these two, and you can leave.”
“What?”
Chris smiled. “I know why you’re working for us. I know what happened with the army. Why my uncle wouldn’t let you stop.”
“You do?”
“You want to live your life with your family,” Chris said. “Retire from this and just sell houses, right?”
Lucky’s heart hammered, but not with fear. Something else, excitement, as if he was digging and his shovel had just uncovered the edge of a treasure chest.
“That’s right.”
Lucky hadn’t realized, until that moment, how much he wanted what Chris was offering. He’d worked with the Winterses for so long that being free from them was a forgotten hope.
And then, suddenly, Lucky felt the wind knocked out of him.
Was this how Renee felt about their marriage?
“My uncle threatened people to get what he wanted,” Chris was saying. “It all came through fear. And that worked for him. I’m different. Chris doesn’t want to threaten you. He wants to give you what you want. If you do this for me, then . . .”
Chris stopped talking, squinted into Lucky’s face.
“What is that?” Something like horror in the young man’s voice.
At Chris’s tone Marley stepped around Lucky, looked him in the eyes.
“You’re crying!” Marley exclaimed.
Lucky wiped the tears from his cheeks. “I’m sorry.”
Chris and Marley seemed dumbfounded. They exchanged uneasy glances.
“You’re crying,” Marley said again, as if this was something contagious.
“It’s just . . .” Something inside Lucky had been turning over, deep in his gut, and now it rose. An earthquake rattling his emotions. “I’m so sorry.”
“This is . . . weird,” Chris said.
A terrible clenching pain seized him and Lucky bent over, wheezed.
“Are you going to hurl?” Marley asked. He and Chris took a quick step back.
“It’s my wife.” Lucky couldn’t stop himself. This was something, a distant part of him realized, that he needed, the rare kind of calm that only comes through confession. It seemed the only way to quell the panic scrambling inside him.
“She’s sleeping with someone else. I just found out.”
Lucky was crying too hard to see either Chris or Marley clearly, gasps shuddering through his body.
“When you said I’d be free to go to my family,” Lucky told them between hard breaths, “well, I just don’t know if my family will still be there.”
Lucky’s face was on the floor, the cold linoleum like balm. He stretched out and flattened his body.
This wasn’t the first time anxiety and grief had overwhelmed Lucky. Three days ago, while shaving in the morning, alone in the house, Lucky had burst into tears. Only for a few minutes, but those tears were uncontrollable. So were his sobs, deep, body-wrenching sobs.
He didn’t know why Renee’s transgression stayed in his thoughts, tugging like an untrained dog on a leash. But he couldn’t stop imagining how often she must think about William, their secret texts and whispered phone calls, the irresistible attraction when they saw each other at work.
Lucky had never felt that type of excitement before.
But he could imagine it in Renee.
“Hey.” A foot nudged his shoulder. “Bro?”
Lucky rose to his knees, shuffled toward Chris and the napkin he was offering.
“I’m so sorry,” Lucky said. He noisily blew his nose. “I don’t, I don’t know what’s happening to me.”
“I think you’re having a panic attack,” Marley said.
“Yeah.” Lucky nodded, shakily rose to his feet. “Would one of you do me a favor? Would one of you hold me? Or maybe both of you?”
Marley and Chris glanced at each other. “I think it’d be weird if I did it,” Chris said. “Since I’m in charge.”
“Boss,” Marley replied, “it’s not like we have HR or something.”
“Then you hold him!”
“Please?” Lucky asked weakly. His knees felt like they might give out.
“Here,” Marley said, and he hurried to the door, brought over an empty coatrack. “Try this.”
Lucky wrapped his arms around the rack, his tears wetting the wood. “This is better. Thank you.”
And, truthfully, there was something strangely comforting about the wooden rack. Lucky had never been particularly given to emotions, but he’d often had longings he was able to ignore. One was the sense, when he embraced Renee or Marybeth, that he didn’t want to let go. The emotion in the embrace was like a blanket to him, and when they pulled away, the blanket was tugged off. And Lucky was left cold and alone.
But the coatrack didn’t pull away, and it didn’t judge him or make him feel needy. There was a resoluteness to the wood that Lucky recognized, and he held on to it the same way a child might clutch a doll, as if this was one of the only things they could fully trust.
“Hey, Lucky,” Chris said, and Lucky realized he’d momentarily forgotten about the other men.
He stepped away, wiped his eyes.
“We’ll find someone else for this job, okay?” Chris told him. “You’ve been good for us, but you’re . . . cracked? You need to take care of yourself.”
“No.” Lucky shook his head. “I can do it. I’m fine. I promise.”
“You were, like, blubbering,” Chris said. “And really having a moment with that coatrack.”
“That made me so uncomfortable,” Marley added.
“I’m okay.” Lucky’s voice was ragged. “Don’t take this chance away from me, Chris. Please. I want to do this. I need to do this.”
“Christ, okay,” Chris said. “Just don’t . . . don’t ever do that in front of me again. I feel gross. Marley, give him the information and let’s go.”
“Yeah, okay,” Marley said. “Jake Smith and Melissa Cruz. I got their pictures here.”
He pulled out his phone and scrolled through it.
And at that moment Lucky was grateful that his face was a blurred mask of tears, that Chris and Marley were too uncomfortable to look directly at him. Otherwise they would have seen his surprise.
Jake Smith.
Lucky knew exactly who Jake was.
CHAPTER SIX
MELISSA
“Did you tie those right?” Melissa asked.
Jake looked up at her from where he was kneeling behind the elderly security guard. “I have no idea.”
“Trust me.” The guard grimaced. “It’s tight.”
She and Jake had decided to bring the old man on board the yacht and to the empty second bedroom. They weren’t sure what to do with him, but, if there was one thing they’d found when exploring other boats, it was rope. Corded, braids, thick and thin strands, fishing wires. And ropes perfect for tying someone up.
They’d tried to tie the guard to a folding plastic chair, using a framed guide for fishing knots helpfully hanging on the wall . . . and couldn’t figure out any of the knots.
So instead Jake and Melissa had used endless amounts of rope and dozens of small shoelace knots throughout. Small rabbit ears drooped up and down the guard’s arms and legs.
Melissa wasn’t confident in their work.
“I’m going to keep searching the warehouse,” Jake said. He handed Melissa the gun. “I’ll see if there’s something else here we can use.”
Melissa sat on the floor of the small room after Jake left, her back against the wall.
Helplessness was spreading through her, the same feeling as when she’d learned the depth and violence of Chris’s crimes.
When she’d realized she needed to leave him.
Or when she’d pushed the knife into that man’s leg at the diner.
It was a trapped feeling, the urgency to make a choice. And, no matter which choice she made, the consequences would alter her life in ways she couldn’t predict.
The only certainty was, regardless of her choice, things would get worse.
“My name’s Harold,” the guard told her. “Harold Thompson.”
Melissa didn’t respond. After a few moments of silence, Harold stared despondently into his lap.
Melissa felt sorry for him. She thought he was a cute old man, short with a little belly touching his thighs, disappointed eyes behind thick, square glasses. White hair combed into a faded crew cut.
“I’m sorry that we had to tie you up,” she told him.
“You could let me go.”
Hope touched Harold’s voice. Melissa was sad to take it away. “We can’t do that. But I promise you, we’re not criminals. We don’t want to hurt you.”
“You broke in here, stole supplies, kidnapped me, and you’re holding me at gunpoint. But you’re not criminals?”
And he doesn’t even know about the diner.
Grief fluttered like a wounded bird.
Melissa abruptly stood. Crossed her arms tight over her chest, started pacing.
“Hey,” Harold’s voice was soft. “You can just let me go. I won’t tell anyone you two are here.”
Melissa didn’t look at him, kept pacing, thinking. “We can’t let you go. Not until Jake and I know what we’re doing next.”
“His name’s Jake?”
That was probably a mistake, but she was too stressed to care.
“What’s your name?” Harold asked.
“Melissa.”
“Jake and Melissa,” he said slowly.
And where was Jake? Melissa wished he would return. Not that Jake would be better in this situation but at least she’d be out of this room. Maybe she could take a walk while Jake stayed with Harold. Get food. Look for help. Think clearly about what they could do next.
“You ever shot a gun?” Harold asked.
“My ex took me shooting.” Melissa knew she shouldn’t share more, knew this information would potentially come back to haunt her, but she didn’t care. Like Jake’s desperate, ill-advised outreach to Eric, she needed to talk.
“You don’t seem like you want to hold it,” Harold said.
Melissa stopped pacing, glanced at the gun in her hand.
“I can help you,” he went on. “All you have to do is let me go. I’ll be out of here, and you’ll never hear from me again. You and Jake can stay as long as you need. I won’t tell anyone.”
“Why would you help us?” Melissa asked.
“Because I don’t want trouble.”
“Aren’t you a security guard? Isn’t stopping trouble your job?”
“Yeah, well, Wharfside isn’t exactly Gotham.”
She couldn’t help a small smile at that.
“Please, Melissa. My granddaughter—”
The door to the room flew open and Jake returned, his camera bumping his chest. The smile on his face, its simple joy, was at odds with the urgent conversation Melissa and Harold were having, like a sudden sunny day in the middle of a rainy week.
“Check this out!” Jake beamed. He lifted his arm to reveal rolls of duct tape circling his elbow to his hand. “You think this will work better?”
His enthusiasm slipped when he saw Melissa’s face. “What’s wrong?”
She’d seen duct tape used to bind someone before.
Melissa walked along the water’s edge, following the path Jake had told her about.
They’d strapped Harold to the chair, his hands and feet securely bound by duct tape.
The same way she’d seen Chris do it.
Melissa tried to push that memory away, but doing so was impossible. Almost as if Chris himself was walking beside her.
She’d met him five years earlier, during her last year of high school in Silver Spring, Maryland. Chris was a year older, a high school dropout who would hang out with friends at the school’s parking lot during lunch, guys gathered around his brown pickup truck like neighbors congregating on a porch. He saw her walking by and left his laughing friends behind to talk to her.
“Hey!”
“Hi.”
Despite the admiring way the other boys had swarmed around him and his cocky stride toward her, Melissa realized that he didn’t know what to say next.
“I’m Melissa,” she said.
“Oh.” Speaking quietly, shyly. Soft eyes gazing out from under long brown hair, thin face, reddish haze of faded acne on his cheeks. Knife-sharp lips. “I’m Chris.”
She liked his uncertainty and nervousness, especially because he was older, the clear leader of those boys watching from his truck.
But her girlfriends didn’t trust him, and her mother didn’t either. Melissa’s mother was overly protective of her only daughter. She’d been in America over twenty years, moving from Panama for marriage with a soldier that quickly ended in divorce, left to raise Melissa alone. The two women were never close, and Melissa’s teenage years were full of fights, almost always because of Melissa’s mediocre grades. Her mother tried to encourage her through shouts, threats, punishments, abuse. None of it worked. Melissa stumbled through high school, and shortly after graduation, her mother had to return to Panama to take care of her own mother. She entrusted Melissa into the care of a good friend who gave her a place to live while Melissa attended Baltimore County Community College.
By that time Melissa and Chris had been together almost a year and he was comfortable around her. But her worried mother saw his nonchalance as arrogance.
“You’re beautiful, but you’re not smart,” her mother told her. “He’ll take advantage of that.”
Those words and their wariness took a toll, a concern that slowly crept in and became Melissa’s own. She worked at the college bookstore in between classes or hung out with girlfriends, and it didn’t help that her friends often wondered aloud why she and Chris rarely saw each other, what could possibly keep him so busy.
But Melissa knew the reason.
He was with his family, and he’d told her about his family. About the Winterses and who they were and what they had done. The constant arrests of their associates, the whispers about his uncle Victor, their wealth and the rumors of how it had been gained. He would never join them, Chris promised her, but he had to spend time with them.
And she understood the power of family, even one you distance yourself from. Family pulls you like water circling a drain.
Four years ago Chris told Melissa that, even though the used car dealership where he had taken a job was a front for his family’s business, none of their work was anything he was involved with. He was excited about the job, his first real one, and she was excited for him. He showed her his first paycheck and they marveled over it together, thousands more than she earned at the bookstore. She had no idea car mechanics made that much.
And no idea they actually didn’t.
Three years ago, Chris admitted his growing involvement with the Winterses to her but promised it was on such a small scale that anything he was caught doing would result in nothing more than a slap on the wrist. And so the threat of danger was there, but distant. Like walking down a dark alley you’re certain is empty.
There was a thrill to that.
And Melissa could see the thrill in him. Chris confessed all this during dinner when they were celebrating her graduation from BCCC. The celebratory feeling of the dinner had already been dimmed by the email she’d received earlier that day, informing her that her only attempt at a scholarship at Towson University, one of the few universities to which she’d applied and the only one that had admitted her, had failed. She couldn’t afford a loan and, despite his insistence, didn’t feel comfortable borrowing from Chris. But she didn’t let that disappointment, or the worry she detected in Chris’s eyes after he’d told her more about the Winterses, ruin their dinner.
Two years ago Chris had promised that the house he bought—an actual house just outside Baltimore with a yard and fence and basement and walk-in closets—had been paid for with money from his new role as assistant manager at the dealership and not from his family. Melissa had growing doubts about Chris’s work and the secrets he kept, but she moved in with him anyway. Her mother had died months earlier, while crossing the street in hectic Panama City, looking to her left, not seeing the city bus barreling toward her from the right. Melissa went to Panama for the funeral, a fast weekend when Panama’s thunderous hot rains soaked everything. Her aunts had stared at her balefully, strained politeness and pointed side comments Melissa did her best to ignore. Her cousins were more cordial. Melissa’s mother had often complained about them, telling Melissa what her sisters said about their children’s work ethic and laziness. Maybe it was true. Or maybe, in Panama, parents distorted love and worry, turned them into a sharp-edged relationship with their children, one defined by the most dramatic elements of each emotion.
The loss of her mother amplified something else for Melissa—her distance from Panama. Her mother had been her only significant connection to the country, and now that she was gone, that connection seemed tenuous, bordering on artificial. Even her grasp of Spanish was failing. Melissa and her mother usually spoke in English, given her mother’s hope for fluency. And so over the years, without practice, Melissa’s Spanish had dulled. That first day in Panama was devoted to fierce concentration, deciphering the words of her weepy grandmother, red-eyed aunts, hushed cousins. Some of the language returned by the end of her trip, but Melissa knew that wouldn’t last.
