“It’s a job you gotta respect,” Ruben said. “Right now, I’m just employed. All this shit I’m not proud of? That’s following orders. That’s providing for my family. But when it’s my name on the door? I won’t abide no fucking around. So yeah, you come through? Me and you are flat. But I don’t want to see you again. Ever.”
Ruben stuck out his hand. David shook it. A deal. “You owe me a wish,” Ruben said.
“I’m sure you’ll think of something,” David said. “I need one more favor.”
“Every time you ask for a favor,” Ruben said, “my potential sentence gets another ten years.”
“I need a body,” David said.
“Whose?”
“Male,” David said. “Natural causes. You got one in the freezer marked for cremation that seemed fine.”
“That’s Mr. Bodi. He’d already been in his house a week when they found him.”
Which is why David wanted him. “Everything goes according to plan, you’ll get him back.”
“I don’t want to know.”
“You’re in luck,” David said, “because I’m not going to tell you. And I already had him picked up. You’ll get me at midnight?”
“This shit,” Ruben said, “is going to turn sideways.”
“It won’t,” David said. “Something might happen, but it won’t happen to us.”
He started back to the Temple. He had calls to make. A plan to execute. Plus, he’d told Rabbi Kales he’d bring dinner to the nursing home.
“Rabbi,” Ruben said, “I did think of something else. About the uncle from the pickup.”
“What’s that?”
“He smelled like a stripper. Like he’d been bathing in peach body wash.”
SIXTEEN
SATURDAY, APRIL 20, 2002
IDAHO FALLS, ID
EARLIER THAT AFTERNOON, OUTSIDE OF IDAHO FALLS, WAITING IN A Starbucks inside a Target while William used the restroom, Jennifer spread out a map. She knew when they got into the car eight hours ago that they needed to go south, but she didn’t want to take a desolate route, in case someone was on her tail. She wanted to hug cities, be within a few minutes or so of a town, or at least a gas station, figuring whoever was going to kill them wouldn’t do it in, say, the parking lot of the Target in Idaho Falls. So instead of shooting down from Spokane toward Oregon on I-5, before cutting down through Utah into Arizona, she’d wound southeast, across Idaho, then into a sliver of Montana, before toggling back down into southern Idaho. Now, she searched for a town on the map where they could spend the night, somewhere in Utah, so that tomorrow’s drive wouldn’t be so long. She knew only one person alive who might take her and William in, and she was in Sedona.
Jennifer ran her finger down the map, avoiding towns that reminded her of the shitty Westerns her father used to read or places that sounded like they were being run by a polygamist cult. Cottonwood? No. Ephraim? No. Cottonwood again? No. Burrville? Elysian Hope? Fish Lake? Beggar’s Pass? No.
Torrey.
She’d gone to school with a girl named Torrey Harris. Kind of girl who was nice to the disabled kids, who when someone new came to school, Torrey showed them around on their first day; the kind of girl who you knew was going to end up being a pediatrician or social worker.
She circled Torrey, Utah, on the map. They could get there by the evening. Find a place to stay. She took out her cell phone, dialed 411, asked for the library in Torrey, Utah, got patched through. Within five minutes, a librarian named Crystal, who only worked there on the weekends, told Jennifer that her cousin Hanna owned a bed-and-breakfast inside an old schoolhouse on the outskirts of town. That would work. Jennifer scratched down the number.
William came out of the bathroom and, for a moment, seemed panicked—he took a few tentative steps into the store, gripped the bottom of his shirt in his tiny fists, a thing he did when he was nervous. She’d been able to shield him from the mess in the family room, from Maryann slumped there, her brains on the wall, grabbing him up and running to the car in the garage, scooping up a basket of clothes from the laundry room on the way out. He slept for the majority of the drive and when he wasn’t asleep, he stared out the window in the backseat, repeating things he’d memorized—lists of prepositions, that mushrooms reproduce via spores, that Death Valley and the Salton Sea are two of the ten lowest places on Earth but you’d have to stack them on top of each other four times before they’d be as deep as the Dead Sea. When he asked her where they were going, she told him the truth: to see Grandma.
Jennifer thought: No one knows us here. I should call the police and they will help us. But what could she say that wouldn’t end up with William in Child Protective Services and her on a forty-eight-hour hold? You see, we’ve been living in protective custody for about a year because my husband is a hit man for The Family and I finally went to the government for help when I became afraid someone would try to kill me to get to him. My son? He killed a security guard in Chicago, but he was just trying to protect me. So. The government is trying to figure what to do about that. Or was. We woke up this morning and our handler was dead.
Forty-eight-hour hold? More like seventy-two. With that story, she might never see William again.
Jennifer waved, caught her son’s eye. He let go of his shirt. Relaxed. “I didn’t see you,” he said when he sat down. He was teary-eyed. “I got worried you left me behind.”
“I’d never leave you behind,” Jennifer said.
“Never?”
“Never.” She reached across the table and swept his bangs from his forehead, so she could see his face. He hadn’t had a decent haircut since they’d ended up at Loon Lake, Jennifer taking it upon herself to do the job with some dull scissors in the backyard until she just . . . stopped. He now looked shaggy and overgrown, like a dog that hadn’t been properly cared for.
“Do you remember that number I told you to memorize?”
“Grandma’s?”
“That’s right,” Jennifer said. “Punch it into my phone.” William did. She took five dollars from her purse and gave it to him. “Go buy yourself a brownie from the nice barista, okay? I’ll be right here. I’ll be watching you the entire time.”
After four rings, Arlene Cupertine, who Jennifer hadn’t seen in years, said, “Hello?”
“Mom,” Jennifer said, “I don’t have much time. I need your help.”
SEVENTEEN
SATURDAY, APRIL 20, 2002
LAS VEGAS, NV
