When She Left: A Thriller, page 8
The two of them had a relationship they needed and cherished, and Jake had never had anything else like that until he’d met Melissa. She and Eric had liked each other immediately, despite Eric’s trepidation about her relationship with Chris Winters and the danger that she brought.
He remembered when Melissa and Eric had first met, and the two of them had talked about Jake’s photography, about his reluctance to share it.
“Don’t you ever want to show it?” Melissa had asked. “Wouldn’t that make you happy?”
He hadn’t known how to reply. And so he hadn’t.
“Jake,” she’d said, crestfallen, “don’t you think you deserve happiness?”
“It’s okay,” Melissa said now, and, as always, her words burned away whatever bad feelings were inside him. “We’ll figure this out.”
The warmth Jake felt toward her at that moment was like heat seeping through a man who had nearly frozen. He didn’t feel dumb or judged.
Just loved.
As if her words had translated that message in the night sky.
“What are you smiling at?” Melissa asked.
Jake blinked, reality resurfacing. “I was just thinking about how much I love you.”
“Cute. But do you think we should do something about that angry old guy who has our gun?”
“We really should.”
“Got any ideas?”
“I really don’t.”
“Hey!” Harold’s voice from inside the warehouse, but close. “I’m coming out!”
They stepped away from the window.
“He sounds scared,” Jake whispered.
“He sounds angry,” she whispered back.
Harold sounded both angry and scared. “I’d better not see either of you!”
Jake and Melissa moved farther away from the window.
“We need to let him go,” Jake said quietly. “But we should leave first. Get the car and go.”
She didn’t respond.
“Melissa?”
“He’ll tell people about us,” Melissa said. “He knows too much. We can’t just let him leave.”
The resolve in her voice worried Jake.
“But what do we do?” he asked. “He has our gun.”
“When he comes outside, you need to flash him.”
Jake stared at her, then down at his zipper. “Sorry?”
“Flash him with the camera. And then we’ll grab the gun.”
“That’s crazy,” he said, but when he looked at Melissa’s face, even in the dark, Jake saw defiance. The commitment to whatever they needed to do next.
The same expression just before she’d driven that knife.
That was something in her that Jake admired and envied and feared. He saw the fighter inside her, the kind of ancient warrior who would run into battle. She was Achilles standing over Hector, Hannibal staring up at the Alps, Joan of Arc glaring as flames rose.
“You’d best not let me see you,” Harold said, his voice just on the other side of the window. His fingers appeared on the sill, straining. Jake heard scrabbling on the other side of the wall.
Melissa touched Jake’s arm.
Harold’s head appeared next, his eyes wide and wild behind his glasses, peering vainly. More scrabbling, and his upper body suddenly filled the window, leaning awkwardly, his arms flailing for balance. No gun in sight.
“Jake,” Melissa urged him.
Harold landed with a thud on the ground. Rolled to his back and panted.
Melissa took a step toward him.
Harold reached behind himself, whipped out the gun. Pulled himself up and sat against the wall and wheezed.
Melissa looked back at Jake. He knew what she wanted but couldn’t bring himself to lift the camera.
Jake tried to tell himself it was because of Harold’s gun, that he couldn’t risk Melissa getting shot . . . and that was part of it but not all of it. The truth was, he couldn’t welcome violence. This was the passivity within himself Jake often resented, timidity and cowardice. It was why he’d lain still as Chris knelt over him, pummeling him. Jake’s own fear of striking back, of provoking an even greater anger.
Don’t you think you deserve happiness?
“There are people looking for us,” Melissa told Harold, urgently. “If they find out we’re here, they’ll come for us and kill everyone in their way. You can’t tell anyone about us, Harold.”
“So what were you planning to do here?” Harold asked, and Jake thought this was a fair question. “Keep me here forever? Kill me when you figure out your next move?”
“We didn’t know what to do,” Melissa said.
“I won’t tell anyone,” Harold said intently. “No one.” He tried to lift himself up and grunted. Slipped back down, the gun in the dirt.
Melissa looked back at Jake, and there was something in her expression that finally spurred him to act.
Not the defiance he saw earlier; it was the opposite. A moment of pity, of knowing he was incapable of helping.
Jake lifted the camera, and the world was suddenly on fire.
The flash was so sudden and bright that, even though Jake knew it was coming, he was still blinded. It was more than a light in darkness, it was an X-ray, showing Harold’s surprise, his eyes and mouth wide. Melissa in slow motion, running toward him, reaching out. Jake following her, unsure what he was doing.
And then he slipped, and his face was pressed against Harold’s chest, buried against his shirt, Jake’s shoes helplessly digging into the dirt, his left knee wet from the ground. Melissa shouting something Jake didn’t understand. Harold screaming like a siren, the same sound over and over.
The camera flashed again and again. Spots of light like winking stars. Jake’s hands covered Harold’s. The gun swung toward Melissa, and she stared at it, frozen, like this was fate.
Strength, mystical strength. Jake bent the other man’s will, bent the will of nature itself as the gun pointed away from Melissa and pressed between their bodies.
“Please,” Jake said, his cheek against Harold’s forehead, Harold still screaming, Jake kneeling above him. The gunshot sounded like splintering wood.
CHAPTER EIGHT
LUCKY
“Nice to see you again,” Lucky said. “Your son’s about to die. Can I come in?”
Ruby Smith stared at him from her doorway.
“Jake?” she asked.
It was just one word, but it was enough to remind Lucky of the hitch in Ruby Smith’s voice, the way a single sound stretched into a pair of syllables.
“Yes.” Lucky glanced up and down the street. Ruby lived in a rambler, and the houses were spread apart, separated by long lawns and lines of trees. Within the triangle of DC, Maryland, and Virginia, houses and businesses were in close proximity, and concrete was everywhere, developers overtaking nature. Here, on the outskirts of Winchester, Virginia, just an hour away from DC, it was the opposite. Distant mountains were like storm clouds, roads disappeared into woods, the air held a slow quiet.
“You’d better come in,” Ruby said.
Lucky followed her inside, closed the door behind himself. The entrance led immediately into the living room, a squat couch in front of a muted television showing Wheel of Fortune, doors leading to other rooms. A painting of Jesus on the wall, long brown hair and demure eyes, hand over his heart.
Very little resale value, which was a shame because outlying towns like Winchester were growing in popularity, spurred by the revolution in remote work and families taking the opportunity to find safer communities with lower costs of living. But any family interested in this aged house would be better served by tearing it down. Building on ashes.
Ruby sat on the couch. “Who’s looking for Jake? The cops?”
“Not just the cops.”
“You too?”
“Yes.”
Ruby’s shoulders slumped.
Lucky intently studied her without appearing like he was intently studying her. He couldn’t read anything in his old friend’s face.
“Of all the people to get involved with . . .” Ruby sighed. “You’d think he’d know better.”
“You’d think we all would.”
She grunted in reply.
Lucky hadn’t seen or spoken to Ruby for years, but there was something in her that hadn’t changed, violence underneath a placid surface, a shark about to erupt from calm waters. This even despite her sadness, the way everything about Ruby was resigned: her squarish stomach; slumped shoulders; small blue eyes; unbrushed, dyed orange hair.
“Did you hear about that mess at the diner the other night?” Lucky went on. “Over in Maryland?”
A shrug.
Lucky wasn’t surprised. The story had already disappeared from the media, stolen by the Winterses or lost in the news cycle. “The paper said a guy named Bruce Parks was after two people. Not sure if you remember him from your time. A pair of customers got shot and killed, and two people escaped and are on the run. That was Jake and this girl, Melissa.”
Ruby took a slow breath before she spoke again. “But Jake’s okay?”
“So far.”
Lucky wasn’t supposed to meet Ruby back when they worked together. She was just the voice on the phone, telling him about jobs, giving details in clues. But there came a night when Lucky was sitting in his car, waiting for the lights to go off in a house across the street, and someone rapped on the passenger side window.
He lowered the window.
“This is the wrong house,” Ruby had told him.
“I wish you’d told me that five minutes ago.”
Even in the night, he saw her pale.
“Kidding.”
Relief took her over. She smiled.
The job was postponed, and she had sat with him in his car, and they talked. Their encounter and the ensuing conversation was probably against some rule the Winterses had, and they indulged in the illicit experience. An hour passed and easily could have slipped into two, but when a neighbor walking a dog stared at Lucky’s car, they decided it was time to leave.
And their friendship remained even after Ruby left the Winterses.
Repentance for her actions had left Ruby desperate to disappear, to change her appearance and name and address, to move to a different city. Lucky had helped her hide, found the house in Winchester for her and her young son. He kept an eye out, and, eventually, the Winterses stopped searching.
“You look exactly the same,” Ruby said.
Lucky hadn’t realized she was examining him as well, but Ruby never missed anything. Those small scanning eyes.
“How’s Marybeth? Almost done with high school, right?”
“Almost.”
A small smile. “How are you handling that?”
“Barely.”
Ruby squinted past Lucky, at the television set behind him. Slid over on the couch to the end table, picked up the remote, and turned it off.
Lucky stayed still.
“So I take it you’re still doing the family man thing?” she asked. “Selling houses during the day, working for the Winterses at night?”
“Why, is Kim Flowers looking to sell?”
“You remember.”
“I should. I was the one who came up with your new name.”
Ruby’s elbow perched on the edge of the couch, her hand dangling near the drawer of an end table.
“We had some good times,” Ruby said.
“It’d be a shame to ruin those memories by going for the gun in that drawer.”
Ruby glanced at the end table, as if surprised. “You think there’s a gun in here?”
“I do.”
“There isn’t.”
Lucky had already calculated the distance, knew he’d made an error. There was no chance he could reach the table before she pulled out the gun, even if Ruby was half as fast as she used to be. He’d be better served by running through the doorway to his left. He wasn’t sure where it led, but at least it’d give him time to pull his own weapon.
“This doesn’t have to go the way you’re thinking,” Ruby said.
“Then why’s your hand next to that table?”
“To distract you.”
Ruby pulled out a small pistol from between the couch cushions with her other hand.
“Told you nothing was in the drawer,” she said. “Now tell me about my son.”
“Oh, Jake.” Ruby sighed.
She was sitting opposite Lucky at her small round kitchen table. Chipped white cupboards over laminate countertops and a linoleum floor. Lucky considered outdated kitchens an almost personal affront, but he kept his annoyance inside, his desire to replace the counters and appliances and entirely remove the wall separating the kitchen from the dining room.
Instead he distracted himself by looking out the window into a square backyard of splotchy grass and dirt.
Ruby’s gun was on the table between them, but closer to her.
“It was always going to be some girl,” she told him. “You know I used to get jealous of them? The girls, I mean. They’d come over, and Jake was so naive, and girls grow up so much faster. I knew what they were doing. What they wanted.” Her voice turned bitter. “He had no idea, of course. Boys are so blind. Then they grow up into stupid men.”
Lucky didn’t necessarily disagree. “You never met Melissa?” he asked.
Ruby shook her head. “I haven’t seen Jake in years. We got into an awful fight, and he left.”
“You were drinking back then?”
She regarded him evenly. “I was.”
“What about now?”
“It’s been eight hundred and nine days. But who’s counting?”
“Where are you working?”
She unscrewed the top of a plastic bottle of water, took a drink. “With a pair of bankruptcy attorneys. Over in town.”
“You’re a lawyer?”
“Office manager.”
“Ah.”
Ruby frowned at him. “You don’t seem like yourself, Lucky.”
He felt like he couldn’t hide a thing from her.
“Family ages a person,” he offered.
“Want to talk about it?”
Lucky was tempted, but he worried emotion would again overwhelm him. “I came here to tell you that your son is being hunted down, and you’re asking me about my marriage?”
“I didn’t say your marriage.” A half smile. “I guess I can’t help it. It’s what I do now. Help people. I have found the Lord.”
“Oh no. Are you going to ask me to pray with you?”
“Do you want me to pray with you?”
“No.”
“Then I won’t,” Ruby said easily. “The thing with the Lord, Lucky, is that we can only help people who want help. It’s like the bankruptcy office. If people don’t walk through the door, then we can’t do anything for them.”
Lucky thought about what Ruby was saying, remembered breaking down the day before in front of Chris Winters and Marley.
“Who do you think killed Victor Winters?” Lucky asked.
“The Devil struck him down.”
“I’d say you’re looking in the wrong direction.”
“There’s only one direction,” Ruby replied. “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.”
Lucky thought for a moment.
“I’m not following any of that.”
“And you couldn’t. It is beyond our comprehension.”
“You don’t want to just say, maybe, it was some other bad guys who killed Victor?”
“Whatever killed Victor Winters had a power that went beyond bad or humanity, even his own reaches. The only thing that could have killed Victor was something belonging to death. Assassins more dangerous than anyone we know.”
Ruby’s words and steady gaze shook something in Lucky, and he had a distinct urge to stand and leave and return home, ensconced within family.
But there was no peace with his family.
Not with Renee, working at her school right now, William McKenna teaching some class down the hall from the administrator office. Renee walking down the hall, glancing through the window of his classroom door. William looking back, and the two of them meeting eyes and smiling. Department meetings where they sat at the same crowded table, maybe occasionally next to each other, their legs pressed together without anyone’s knowledge. Sudden dalliances in her office, the door closing and him sweeping her up in a rough, quick kiss or more, Renee fixing her hair and adjusting her clothes after he left, that flushed excitement in her cheeks.
“Lucky?”
Ruby’s gun was aimed at him.
Lucky had been reaching into his pocket but stopped. “I’m just getting my phone.”
“Stand up and let me watch you do it.”
He stood slowly, reached into his jacket pocket. Pulled out his phone.
Ruby lowered her arm.
Lucky opened WatchFull and checked the camera outside William McKenna’s house. He hadn’t received a notification but had a distinct feeling, one of those moments of sudden instinct or superstition, that he would see Renee’s car parked outside.
The driveway was empty.
He slipped his phone back inside. Sat down.
“I’m surprised you still have the gun I gave you.”
“Why?” Ruby set the gun back on the table, close to her.
“Because, Jesus?”
A shadow passed through those piercing blue eyes.
“There’s a bar down the street,” Ruby said. “Right around the corner. I drive past it every day to and from work. And I always look at it. Always. I look at the entrance, and I think about how I didn’t go in and how some days I want to. Some days I come here, and it’s just me and my memory, and that bar is around the corner, and nothing’s lonelier than that.”
“Sounds like you need to move. We should do something about this kitchen, though.”
“But what helps me,” Ruby went on as if Lucky hadn’t spoken, “is what’s around the corner, on the other side of this street. A church. Sometimes, at the beginning, I’d go there crying, almost crawling, every single night. That’s the place I’d go when I wanted a drink. When I was alone.”
