The Easy Way Out (Jake Travis Book 9), page 1
CONTENTS
Also by Robert Lane
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Epilogue
About the Author
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Other Jake Travis Novels
ALSO BY ROBERT LANE
The Second Letter
Cooler Than Blood
The Cardinal’s Sin
The Gail Force
Naked We Came
A Beautiful Voice
The Elizabeth Walker Affair
A Different Way to Die
THE EASY WAY OUT
A JAKE TRAVIS NOVEL
ROBERT LANE
Copyright © 2022 Robert Lane
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-7322945-5-4
Mason Alley Publishing, Saint Pete Beach, Florida
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any print or electronic form without the author’s permission.
This is a work of fiction. While some incidents of this story may appear to be true and factual, their relation to each other, and implications derived from their occurrences, is strictly the product of the author’s imagination. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), localities, companies, organizations, and events is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by James T. Egin, Bookfly Design
He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.
—Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche
PROLOGUE
It was late May in Saint Petersburg, Florida: summer coming into pitch, the sun in full command of the sky. The bullet, free of its chamber, sliced the thick afternoon air. It crossed the interstate in a meaningless speck of time, cleared a FedEx truck, and entered the airspace above the public park adjacent to the elementary school.
Liana Castillo pumped her legs to urge the swing as high as possible. She loved the precise moment when her body hung motionless before falling backward. At that highest point, Liana envisioned her soul continuing upward, floating from her body before reuniting in a backward arch.
Not that she shared that sensation with anyone, for Liana didn’t understand this business about the soul. No clue. She’d heard the word in church—it seemed mighty important. And judging by the mumbling adults who crowded her on Sunday morning, it certainly could use a ton of forgiving. But she’d never summoned the nerve to ask what it was, what it had done so terribly wrong. Liana found only joy inside. Evil had yet to make its presence known in her budding life.
Liana’s mother, Theresa, sat on a bench, having relented to her youngest daughter’s plea for a five-minute swing. Theresa finished sending a text, coughed, stood, and stuffed her phone in her purse.
“Let’s go, baby. If you want spaghetti, we need to stop on the way home and pick up some meatballs.”
At age ten, Liana had not sampled the world’s culinary delights, but if she had—sampled all the culinary delights the nations could present—spaghetti and meatballs would never be dethroned.
The bullet.
At the top of her arch, just as her soul gained separation, the bullet, on a downward trajectory, grazed her head. Liana’s tender body splayed to the ground, where her head struck with a sickening thud.
“Baby!”
Theresa dropped her purse. She rushed to her daughter’s rag doll body. Theresa Castillo knew what a hurt child looked like. What a sleeping child looked like. Above all, she was terrifyingly aware that she had no experience, no reference point, for what confronted her—awkwardly crumpled legs and arms protruding in unnatural angles like broken twigs. The god-awful stillness of her daughter’s body.
She fell to her knees.
No! No! No!
A crow landed next to the body.
Years later, when the house was empty, the noise gone, Theresa Castillo would credit the bird for squelching her anger with the world that perpetuated so many lies.
A FEW MINUTES LATER, Nicky Riggins climbed out of his 2008 Honda Accord like it was a damn Bentley. He strolled into a Circle K and grabbed a pair of hot dogs, a handful of condiments, a Coke, and a bag of chips. He dumped them on the counter.
“These, too.” Riggins grabbed a package of Skittles.
Riggins was always jacked after a job. This one didn’t go as planned, but fuck it. Besides, they’d paid him upfront. Said he’d give it his best shot. Huk. Huk.
“You like Skittles?” he asked the man behind the counter.
The man kept his face down.
“You know you do,” Riggins said. “Everyone loves fuckin’ Skittles.”
Riggins didn’t bother to pay. Nor did the man behind the counter solicit any money. The clerk knew his job was to just bag the items and not to cause any trouble. Not for a pair of wieners. Not for a bag of chips. Not for all the cash in all the cash registers in the world. Besides, in another month he was moving his family to a different neighborhood. Got a new job. Adios, Circle K.
He’d been working twelve-hour days since before his first memory. He finally had enough money for a down payment. A house had come on the market that afternoon, and he couldn’t wait to tell his wife. The kitchen had been remodeled with all stainless-steel appliances. His wife craved that gleaming symbol of arrival more than anything. She had just texted him: they were having spaghetti that night, and she was going to stop by the store on the way home, and was there anything else he needed? Spaghetti and a new house. What a day. Their time had come. Hard work does pay off.
His phone rang.
Theresa.
Did she wonder if spaghetti was okay for dinner? She knew it would be. He’d planned on telling her about the house when he got home, but it was all too exciting and gushing out of him. I’ll tell her now. Yes. Yes, that’s what I’ll do.
Manuel Castillo would spend the remainder of his life stuck in the moment right before his finger tapped the phone.
1
It was midway through the second year of my daughter’s life that Brittany, my older sister and only sibling, told me her twenty-four-year-old son was missing.
My sister and I were sitting at the end of my dock. A lazy outgoing tide funneled the water through Pass-a-Grille Channel and out toward the Gulf of Mexico, less than a mile from our dangling toes. A pod of dolphins, Monet’s underwater ballerinas, gracefully broke the surface. Sheepshead nibbled on the pilings, their striped bodies rising and falling like spirits in the water. A day has never passed when I have not sat at the end of the dock. That’s not true, of course, but I’d like it to be true.
“Mom came to me in a dream,” Brittany said. “She said, ‘Evan is suffering.’”
“Suffering? How so?”
“I don’t know, Jake. It was a dream. I don’t believe that stuff for a nanosecond. Besides, how would she even know his name?” She glanced over at me. “Crazy, right?”
“Nothing is crazy.”
“You’re right.” She swayed her head. “And that’s what’s crazy.”
“I can’t be right?”
“You know what I mean.”
Whenever I’m with Brittany, I’m reminded of the monorail at Walt Disney World. Brittany and I rode it once, as children, our hands pressed to the glass, gliding through the magic kingdom of youth.
We want to believe life is that monorail. A suspended journey to an enchanted theme park of dizzy happiness, a land of milk and honey. Goofy. Minnie. Mickey. Donald. The gang’s waiting for us amid piped-in music, sparkling fountains, postcard palm trees, and flawless green grass laced with walkways cleaner than your kitchen counter. Never mind that a cast member is suffocating inside the costume for union wages to create your glorious illusion. We see and believe what we want to. And in the Sunshine State, we expect to be in a sunshine state of mind.
But my family’s life had been violently derailed. During our vacation—a few days after our monorail ride—we were lounging around a motel pool in Florida. Brittany went to our room to retrieve a book. My parents never saw her again.
Matilda.
Everyt
I’d discovered eight years ago that Brittany was not only alive but married with two children and living three hours north of me. It’s a long story. It had a happy ending. Not all stories do. We’d kept in touch since then, but not as much as either of us would have liked. It had been difficult for us to carve time out of our lives for each other. That’s what I tell myself, although it is something I prefer not to examine too closely.
After she was snatched from their lives, I became an unbearable reminder to my parents of what used to be. A survivor from their aborted dreams. Kathleen has suggested I see a “professional.” My wife is a goddess with words. A wizard of letters, a commander of commas, and an admiral of paragraphs. But even the great ones whiff sometimes.
I asked Brit where Evan was in his life.
“He graduated a year ago from UF with a master’s in English lit,” she said. “He’s working on his PhD and wants to write, but he knows it’s a long shot to make a living at it. I think he’ll eventually teach.”
I’d not seen my nephew, Evan, in three years. Maybe four. Sad, considering people commented on how similar we looked.
“When was the last time you heard from him?”
“Couple months, three maybe? We were in Europe for three weeks. We didn’t hear from him the first month or so we were back. He was never one to call much. I talk with Addison every few days. Boys are different, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t close. We are.
“He did security system work for TOTA Technologies. They’re a software company in downtown Saint Pete. They started as a home and commercial security company and still do a little in that space. I think he was more of a freelancer for them.”
“TOTA Technologies?”
“Ever hear of them?”
“No,” I lied. I didn’t want to needlessly worry her.
Her eyes tracked a leaf riding the ebb tide. “I feel stupid for not knowing more. I called them, but they said he hadn’t worked there in months. It’s not like him.”
“Did you file a police report?”
She nodded. “With no suspicion of foul play, they weren’t too interested in pursuing a twenty-four-year-old man who hasn’t called his mother in eight weeks. It’s hardly a crime.”
“Obviously they’re not mothers.”
Brit flashed a smile. “You got that right.”
My older sister was aging well. Crow’s feet had sneaked in around her eyes, but her smile was as effortless as it had been when we were children, her soothing voice unmarred by the abrasion of time.
“Imagine if I’d told the police about my dream,” she said. “They would really think I was nuts. You’ll help me, right?”
“Crackpot like you? No way.”
She shoved me in the shoulder.
“It’s a shame we haven’t seen each other more,” she said.
“That’s on me.”
“No. We both bear that. Let’s do better, and not just because of Evan. Deal?”
“Deal,” I said. And I meant it.
Our last Christmas together, I stumbled down the stairs three at a time, only to find her in her bathrobe, clutching her green stocking. Mine was red. My mother saw them as Christmas colors. My father as starboard and port. To go from that to her disappearance three months later, witness my family get amputated limb by limb—my mother by cancer, my father by the bottle—was something no “professional” could help me with.
Kathleen calls that a bad attitude.
Brittany needed my help, and I saw an opening. An opportunity to make amends. For as I’d come to build my own family, to author my own life, my anger toward my parents morphed to forgiveness. Empathy. Even compassion. The Latin root of compassion is pati—to suffer. Com means with. Compassion is not empathy. It is not understanding. Compassion is to feel another’s pain as your own. Now that I have my own daughter, I feel my parents’ hurt. I’ve come to see their downfall as inspiration to create joy from their sorrow.
Joy. That’s my daughter’s name.
The sailboats Fantasea and Magic glided past, tourist legs draped over the bows. The taut mainsails glowed yellow as if the sinking sun were beckoning them toward the horizon, willing the boats to the edge of the earth. A pelican smacked the water, uninterested in the poetic world.
“Joy is a beautiful child,” Brittany said, as if my hobbling thoughts were stitched on the passing sails. “I couldn’t see you as a father—you were pretty serious about that army stuff—but you’re a natural around her.”
“I’m afraid,” I said.
“Of what?”
“That I’ll screw up.”
“Of course you will. Take it from one who’s further down the road than you. They’ll forgive you long before you forgive yourself.”
Hadley III appeared. She sniffed Brittany, then nestled between us and folded her front legs underneath her. Brittany stroked the cat behind her ears.
“I think Kathleen wants another one,” I said.
“Cat?”
“Kid.”
“You think?”
“We haven’t explicitly discussed it.”
“Ahh. We’ve all been there. And why would that be?”
“She’s afraid I’ll say yes and not really mean it.”
“We’ve been there as well. Would you? Really mean it?”
“Damn the torpedoes. But it would have to be a private adoption. We got lucky with Joy. Having someone intersect our lives who happened to be bearing an unwanted child.”
“Could happen again.”
“That’s not a game plan.”
“You think there’s a game plan, little brother?”
“Tell me more about Evan.”
She said the last time they spoke was before she left for Europe. He indicated the owner of TOTA, Edward Giancarlo, had asked him to do side jobs, security cameras for his house and a warehouse the company owned west of downtown. “But he never talked much about his work. He considered it nothing more than a means to put food on the table.”
She contacted his friends. They hadn’t heard from him in some time. They were concerned, which troubled her. She called the police.
“I knew something was wrong. But at the same time, I desperately wanted to hear his voice on the phone telling me he was swamped, that he had lost his phone. I held on to that wish for too long. Stupid of me.”
“What about his apartment?”
She brushed away a few strands of her auburn hair. The air is always agitated at the end of the dock. “He lived in downtown Saint Pete. His suitcase is still there. So is his backpack, but no computer. He would never take his computer out of his apartment without putting it in his backpack. I’d like you to look at his apartment. Maybe you’ll see something I missed.”
Hadley III stood, gave me a sniff, walked a few paces behind us, and stared at the water. A palm leaf rode the tide, and a center-console fishing boat with twin engines roared in from the Gulf, its wake scaring the water. The cat didn’t heed the noise. Its attention was on the leaf. I’ve always marveled at—envied—the cat’s ability to coldly shut out the rest of the world in favor of what captivates it.
