He took a breath and looked over my shoulder. I didn’t follow his gaze, but I could hear Maggie and Ethan both crying as they helped Jimmy into their car.
I lowered my voice. “I’m the best chance those girls have got. And you’re the best chance my family—” I swallowed, “—your family has of making it through this alive. You and Erica. Please don’t put all of them at risk out of some admirable but misguided sense of honor.”
He turned his pained expression toward me, desperate for there to be any other way, knowing there wasn’t.
I said, “Let me end this.”
“I’ll call you as soon as I have the box,” I said to Erica. She was standing next to my open car window, having cuffed the deputies to the steering wheels of their squad cars. After they dropped Jimmy at the hospital and were a safe distance away, she would make an anonymous 911 call telling the rest of their squad where to find them. Other than some bumps and bruises, they would all live.
Everyone else was in the Chevy, its engine idling. Denise sat behind the wheel, the kids were in the back, and Jimmy was leaning against Robert in the middle row, a balled-up rag from beneath Aunt Irene’s sink pressed against the bullet hole in his back. “Drop him at the hospital and then make sure you get everyone else away. Just keep driving. If you don’t hear from me once every hour . . .”
I didn’t need to finish the sentence. We’d already been over it.
“I still agree with Robert,” Erica said. We’d been over that, too. She was firmly in the stay-and-fight camp. “We know she’s coming. We can prepare.”
I started shaking my head before she finished speaking. “We can’t risk it if Jimmy’s telling the truth about his kids. Besides, even if we manage to take her out, which is far from a sure thing no matter how much we prepare, it still won’t be over. Trish can just send someone else. And they will keep coming. Unless I shift the focus onto me.”
She disagreed, but held her tongue.
“Please keep them safe.”
“You know I will,” she said, then turned back to the Chevy.
I grabbed the gearshift to drop the car into reverse when Denise appeared at the window. “Hey,” I said.
Her eyes were dancing again. She started to speak and then stopped, as if unsure what she wanted to say now that she was standing there. She settled on leaning over and gently brushing the butterfly bandage covering the cut Jimmy’s fist had opened in my eyebrow. “How’s your head?” she asked.
“Hurts.”
She pulled her hand away and grabbed the open window frame of the door. “You really fucked things up, you know?”
I nodded. “I know. But I’m going to fix it. I promise.”
She shook her head and wiped at her eyes with the hand that wasn’t holding the door. “I don’t mean just that.” When she stopped, those brown eyes had stopped dancing and stared straight back at me. “We had something good, me and you. I just wish you would have talked to me before you did what you did. We could have worked things out, could have—”
Her voice broke, and she dropped her forehead against the edge of the door. I rested my hand on the back of her neck. For a minute, she let it sit there, let me feel the subtle shakes as she fought back the emotion she hated anyone to see. When I let my hand drift into her hair, though, that was a step too far. With her head still down, she reached back and grabbed my hand, squeezing it once before removing it and placing it on the door. Then she picked her head up and sniffed.
“Be careful,” she said. It was the same two words she’d said to me earlier, before I’d been cuffed and beaten, before her fiancé’s partner had been shot, before her already fucked-up world took another dramatic turn into Shitville. But these two words were different. This time, it sounded like she actually meant them.
“I will,” I said, but she was already walking away.
I watched her go, watched her get behind the wheel without another glance back, then pulled the old Buick out of the driveway and watched the Chevy follow behind me, down the windy mountain road. At the base of Aunt Irene’s Hill, they turned right, to the west.
I headed east.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
“It’s a little nothing stream about a half mile off one of the main hiking trails by the resort,” Robert had told me, finally resolved to letting me do what needed to be done. “My dad used to take me fishing there every summer. Got a few salmon in it, some trout. Never caught much of anything big enough to keep, but that wasn’t the point.”
“Father-son fishing trips are rarely just about the fish,” I’d said, thinking of the first and only time I’d taken Ethan fishing with Maggie and me, off a small dock on a man-made lake in a park near our house. He’d had a Spider-Man fishing rod that was about two feet long, but still awkward for his three-year-old hands to hold. I’d had to help him not only bait the hook but cast and reel in the line, too. Still, when he made his only catch of the day—a sunny no bigger than six inches—he grinned like he’d just hooked a great white.
“No they’re not, are they?” Robert said. He didn’t pursue that particular line of philosophical thought, and for that I was appreciative. “Anyway, no one else knew about the spot but us. The stream ran too shallow a lot of the time to make it worth the trip for serious fishermen, and getting to it was a pain when the brush got thick in the spring and summer. I don’t recall ever seeing anyone else there in all the times he and I went. It’s easy enough to find, though.”
“And you’re sure the box is still there?” I’d asked.
“I take a drive up every week to check.”
“Nobody ever questions you? That’s like a six-hour round trip.”
“Jeff told my captain he needed me to do periodic check-ins on an informant they had stashed in the area, which was good enough for him. No one else needed to know. When you’re an unofficial part of an FBI joint task force, you get to throw the word classified around a lot. ”
The stream was nestled on the grounds of a ski resort in the heart of the Pocono Mountains. I made it there a little after 2:30 in the afternoon, the rusty old Buick doing better than I expected once she got humming with no traffic in front of her. The resort was a fancy one called Woodlake, just outside Big Bear at Masthope Mountain. Truly gorgeous. On-site spa, golf course, four-star restaurants. Everything all-inclusive. The kind of place I fantasized about taking Denise back when we had no kids but no money either. Treating ourselves to a weekend away in those days meant renting a hotel room down the Jersey Shore in the offseason. Dropping $1,000 for one night in the Poconos would have been the equivalent of financial suicide. Assuming we could have made a reservation anyway. According to their website, they were booked solid nearly a year out.
I pulled into a small lot behind the main building, popped the trunk and removed the shovel I’d borrowed from Irene’s shed.
Robert’s directions were deceptively simple:
Start at the mouth of the blue hiking trail and follow it about a mile until you reach a large granite boulder covered in moss by the side of the path. Easy to spot and the first such boulder you’ll encounter.
Cut through the woods directly across from the boulder and head due west for another half mile or so until you reach the stream.
Follow the stream north a few hundred paces until you come upon a tree with the words “Jay and Abby 4Ever” inside a heart carved into its bark.
A few feet from the trunk sits a flat hunk of stone that looks vaguely like the shape of Texas, about a yard across. Easy enough to lift but too heavy to tempt any kid passing by to toss it into the stream just to watch it splash.
About two feet directly underneath of that stone is the box, sealed inside a plastic evidence bag.
