“Are you on vacation?” Kristy said.
“I haven’t taken a vacation in twenty years, Agent Levine.”
“That’s the difference between you and me,” Kristy said. It wasn’t the only one; she knew that much for sure. “You need to assure me I’m not gonna get into some rogue shit where I end up losing my pension. If I survive this cancer, I need it to live on, eventually.”
“You won’t.”
“Everyone you sent here is either dead or on the run,” she said.
“You solve this, you won’t have to worry about pensions. They’ll build a statue for you in Chicago. You’ll be the person who finally ended The Family once and for all.”
TWELVE
FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 2002
LOON LAKE, WA
JENNIFER CUPERTINE DIDN’T DREAM ANYMORE. AT FIRST SHE THOUGHT IT was the Ambien, but then she weaned herself off the prescription and her nights became bouts of intermittent blackness broken up by sitting straight up, gasping for breath, a metallic taste in the back of her mouth, her heart beating so hard she could feel every vein in her face. After a few weeks, she was convinced she’d die like this, stuck in blackness forever, vaguely aware that she should be somewhere else, content to be quiet for just a few hours, but even in the blackness always the feeling of something lurking, waiting, and she knew, in some way, that it was every man her husband had ever killed. You love a monster; you are a monster. She couldn’t hear it, but in the blackness, it was the message. And so she’d pull herself out from it, clawing for lucidity, only to find herself back in the real world. Where was this sense of peace everyone felt when they were slipping off this mortal coil, only to be yanked back to life? Every documentary she saw, it was the one universal: this feeling of remarkable peace and joy followed by the message—usually from a mother figure—that said your job in this realm was not done yet, that your child needed his mother. And then the imagery of a rock garden or a flowing river or the gentle sounds of a summer rain.
All Jennifer got was her terrified gasping, gulping air like water.
Every doctor she’d visited in the last year had told her she was in—surprisingly!—excellent health. These were government doctors, though, so Jennifer never knew what to believe. Would they tell her if she were in congestive heart failure? They told her to track the experiences, see if there was a pattern. For two weeks, she kept a notebook and a pen beside her alarm clock.
Bed: 11:12 p.m.
Wake: 1:41 a.m.
Wake: 3:33 a.m.
Wake: 4:46 a.m.
Out of bed: 6:34 a.m.
Was the house waking her up? Was something going off at that same time every night? The carbon monoxide detector? The neighbor’s dog? An agent’s alarm?
Bed: 12:33 a.m.
Wake: 1:13 a.m.
Wake: 2:19 a.m.
Wake: 4:02 a.m.
Out of bed: 7:02 a.m.
Nothing. No pattern. At least the Ambien kept her asleep.
What she missed about dreaming was easy to pinpoint. It was the only time she was allowed to be with Sal without feeling the pressing walls of the world’s judgment. The FBI agents and U.S. Marshals were unfailingly kind to her—and they tried with William, they really did—but she knew that if Sal knocked on the door tomorrow, they’d put one between his eyes. They were the only adults in her life and yet she could never talk to them about the pain she felt, every single day, the void in her life that was her husband, because she knew they’d have to fake compassion. Her husband had killed at least four FBI agents. Her husband had probably killed another hundred men. Her husband had disappeared into the real world and was living his life, somewhere, and here she was, locked inside a house on a lake twenty-five miles out of Spokane. Maybe someone’s idea of paradise, but for Jennifer, a city girl through and through, this was like living in the 1800s. And yet, she could imagine living here with Sal, in this house, their back a mountain, their front a body of water, one road in, one road out, a feeling of safety or imprisonment, depending upon the day.
But that was a dream, too. One she didn’t let herself have, unless she had a few glasses of scotch before bedtime, something that was happening too often these days, bedtime getting earlier, the scotch becoming more plentiful.
And so, on this third Friday in April, she willed herself to stay up until 11:30 p.m. watching the news in bed, William asleep beside her. It had been like this for the last three nights, since Levi and the two agents on security detail got a call and then disappeared—Jennifer didn’t know where, only that they were gone within the hour—leaving only Maryann to watch over them. Now, with all this shit happening in Las Vegas, it was pretty clear that the president, or whoever was in charge of this sort of thing, conscripted every available FBI agent to help with the investigation. Jennifer didn’t figure that government thought of her and William as high-priority assets, so it made sense they would yank people off her detail. But William was now scared, obsessively checking the windows and doors—like he needed one more thing to obsess over—even made the three of them walk the perimeter of the property after dinner, just in case.
“He’s always watching you,” Maryann told her once they’d come inside, Jennifer washing dishes, Maryann drying them. “There’s going to come a time when you two are apart, and I worry about how he’ll react to the freedom.”
“When’s that going to be?”
“I don’t know,” Maryann said. “I’d guess that in the next few months, the Marshals will try to resettle you in a place where he can go to regular school. You can get a job. That sort of thing. This situation here isn’t permanent. It never is.”
“If I’d known how hard it would be,” Jennifer said, “I might have tried to stay out on our own.”
“Honestly? You’d both be dead. You’re in a good situation here, Jennifer. I know it’s hard to see it from this angle. And the information you’ve given about how The Family operates has saved lives. I know it feels like stasis. Sometimes, it’s as simple as purchase orders being approved before a move can be made. You’re still important. You’re just inside a vast bureaucracy now. Next year at this time, I wouldn’t be surprised if William was somewhere getting the help he needs in an environment that is healthy for you both. Palo Alto or Ann Arbor or even Austin. All would be good options for the programs at the universities.”
Jennifer knew this was true. She knew that William needed help. This sweet boy with his head in her lap, snoring from his mouth, both of his thumbs twitching, surely playing video games in his own dream life. In some ways, he was still a little boy, scared of things like thunder and lightning—plentiful in these parts—and then in other ways, he was completely unknowable. He memorized everything. She had to hide certain books because it was impossible for him not to memorize passages and then repeat them back to her. But also, he could tell you—verbatim—the warning label from a bottle of antifreeze. And then there were the facts he’d digested. His latest obsession was about the speed of a falling body. How long did it take a body to reach terminal velocity?
She slid William’s head off her lap, straightened him out in her bed, watched him for a few moments. Eight years old, going on infinity.
JENNIFER WALKED INTO THE KITCHEN. MARYANN SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE in a nightgown, reading a book, a cup of coffee and her .357 on the table beside her, still in its ankle holster. The TV was on in the attached family room, filling it with a familiar blue glow, the sound off, Jay Leno talking to Justin Timberlake.
“You don’t need to stay up all night,” Jennifer said. She filled up a glass of water.
“It’s fine,” she said. “I catnapped during the day. Steve and Britt left this morning, too, so it’s on me for twenty-four hours. Tomorrow afternoon, the field office will send a patrol every couple of hours; I’ll catch up then. Don’t worry.”
“William is in my room again.”
“Okay,” she said, and she forced out a frown. “You’ll miss that at some point.” Maryann was supposed to be William’s grandmother, which meant she was supposed to be in her sixties, but Jennifer knew she dyed her hair gray and caked foundation in the lines around her eyes and mouth, bringing out what would be more subtle wrinkles. She wore clothes from the Goodwill, a size too small in some cases. Maybe she was fifty, fifty-five.
“Should I lock us in the room?” Jennifer asked.
