Abandoned

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

AD Jones sits in the living room, watching me. I called; he came. Mercy Lane remains shackled and silent. Tommy is tense. Kirby is bored. “Sir?” I venture.

I can’t decipher the look he’s giving me. It seems weary and angry and rage-filled and sad. There is no confusion. It’s as though he’s been expecting to find himself in this place. He is not surprised, but he longs for all the moments that came before.

“I’m going to do something here,” he says to me, finally speaking. “Just this once.” He surveys Dali/Mercy, who is unperturbed. “Because she took your finger and your hair. Mostly, because you didn’t pull the trigger, which means you’re still a person to me.”

I swallow and nod. I’m unable to speak. My throat is choking suddenly with the force of unshed tears. Grief has replaced my desire to kill. My finger and my hair, he says out loud, but those just stand for all the other things, the things he means but has left unsaid.

“This is it, Smoky,” he continues. “This is what you get in return for what you’ve lost. This one pass. Just this once. You understand me?”

My eyes tell him that I do.

“Okay,” he says. “Here’s what’s going to happen.”

It was a simple lie, the best kind. I’d gone to AD Jones with my suspicions about the identity of Dali. He’d given me permission to poke around on my own. Everything else followed on the heels of that. The reverse GPS. The trip to Vegas. The confrontation based on manufactured probable cause.

Mercy Lane will be taken into custody by the AD and flown back to Los Angeles on the jet. Kirby will fade into the background, never here. Tommy and I will drive home while the AD flies in Callie and others to oversee evidence collection.

It’s a rickety story, full of holes, ready to leak, but it’ll be enough. We know how to break the law. It’s something you do quietly, with few witnesses, and only ever with those you trust.

“Your involvement has to be at a minimum from this point on,” he says to me. “I’ll handle everything else.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He sighs. The rage is gone; just the sadness remains. Watching him be sad is like watching rain fall against a mountain. Something solitary. He folds the sadness away after a time, back inside himself, and the rain ends. Just the mountain remains, eroded by such moments.

Mercy Lane clears her throat, attracting our attention. “Let’s bargain.”

AD Jones frowns at her. “What the fuck do you have to bargain with?”

“I’ve been weighing all the variables, and you haven’t left me with any options. You’re going to find evidence of the GPS tracker here, as well as other things. I could try to tell a story about kidnapping and attempted murder by the FBI, but I wouldn’t be believed. The only thing left for me to control is the comfort of my incarceration and whether or not I live or die.”

“It’ll be hell and then you’ll die,” Kirby chirps. “Count on it.”

Mercy ignores her. “The easiest way to lie is to not have to lie at all. If you’ll concede to certain comforts and agree not to pursue the death penalty, I’ll confess freely and accept whatever prison time you want to impose. Our stories will match and no one will ever be the wiser.”

She’s calm, reasonable, cold. AD Jones gapes. I touch his arm with a hand.

“You confess here, now, on video,” I say. “It has to be bulletproof. And you go to jail forever.”

She inclines her head. “Agreed.”

This is Dali, this is Mercy Lane. The face of pragmatism. Survival is the only prize worth having.

“I don’t know,” AD Jones mutters. “We’ll have to get approval from the attorney general’s office first.”

“We can get it,” I say to him. “Tell someone who’s interested that I’ll owe them a favor. They want me, remember?”

He is quiet for a time. “Yeah. I guess that’s true.” He waves a hand, dismissing us. “Get out of here. I’ll go sell your soul for you.”

Tommy drives us home, as silent and inscrutable on the return as he was on the approach. I have no sense of him right now. Kirby seems untroubled but empathetic, content to keep quiet as long as the radio is on.

We pull into our driveway as the sun is coming up.

“Hop on out and turn over the keys,” Kirby says, fresh-scrubbed and bright, a blond and guiltless Pontius Pilate. “I’ll get rid of this vehicle and the guns and that’ll be that.” She winks. “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas right?”

Tommy sits on the edge of the bed, examining his hands. I sit next to him. His silence has become a solidity, something pervasive, like a wall of smoke or a bank of fog.

“Tommy,” I venture. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.” He continues to look at his hands. His voice sounds far away.

“Are we okay?” I ask.

His eyes focus on me now, but he seems confused, as if I just shook him awake.

“Of course we’re okay. We’re fine.”

“Then what’s wrong? You’re a quiet guy, but never for this long.”

He goes silent again. Watches the wall. “We almost killed a human being, Smoky,” he murmurs. “We hunted her down and we were prepared to execute her, to bury her body in the desert. That deserves some thought. That deserves my attention. Don’t get me wrong, I knew that’s what we were going to do. I played my part with both eyes open. But we almost took a life, cold-bloodedly. I would have done it too. You pulled us back from the brink, but I would have done it if you hadn’t. I don’t want to hold that under or push it aside or ignore it in any way. I want to feel it.”

I swallow my grief and my pain and my faint self-loathing.

“How does it feel?” I ask him.

He doesn’t answer right away. I watch him struggle. I observe evidence of sadness and strength, a mixture of love and loss, and, above these things, endurance. Tommy, I realize, is what my dad called “a laster.”

A laster, Dad told me, is someone who can endure everything without losing who they are. Like this woman I read about recently. She and her family were sent to the concentration camps in World War Two. She was twenty-five, married to her childhood sweetheart, had three children. She was the only one who made it out alive. She healed and went on to find new love and have another two sons. She died surrounded by her children and her grandchildren. A laster. Your mom is one.

What about you?

Me? No. I’m not a laster.

Dreamer though he was, Dad always judged himself honestly. I think that’s one of the reasons Mom let herself love him.

“It feels bad,” Tommy answers. He flexes his hands into fists, releases them. “But it’ll pass.”

I come into his arms, a sign of assent, but in my heart of hearts, that place where we’re always alone, I am less certain.

What does that make me?

Am I a laster?

We nap through the morning. It is a fitful sleep, filled with dreams I forget the minute I jolt awake. Just one image I am allowed to keep: my mother, silent. She watches me, not judging, not sad, warning me even as she understands.

Don’t forget the lighthouse, her eyes seem to say. Swim out too far and you’re too far out. Don’t forget, honey, because that ocean is always dark and always bottomless and when you sink, you sink forever.

I snuggle into my husband and search for whatever peace he can give me.