Текст книги "Six Years"

Автор книги: Harlan Coben

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“Fresh Start isn’t just the three of us, of course. We have a committed staff. You met Cookie and some of the others. There aren’t many, for obvious reasons. We have to trust each other completely. At one point, Malcolm thought that you’d be an asset to the organization.”

“Me?”

“That was why he suggested that you attend that retreat. He hoped to show you what Fresh Start was doing so that you’d join us.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I went with the obvious: “Why didn’t he?”

“He realized that you wouldn’t be a good fit.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We work in a murky world, Jake. Some of the things we do are illegal. We make our own rules. We decide who is deserving and who is not. The line between innocence and guilt isn’t so clear with us.”

I nodded, seeing it now. The black-and-white—and the grays. “Professor Eban Trainor.”

“He broke a rule. You wanted him punished. You couldn’t see the extenuating circumstances.”

I thought about how Malcolm had defended Eban Trainor after the party where two students had been rushed to the hospital for alcohol poisoning. Now I saw the truth. Professor Hume’s defense of Trainor had been, in part, a test—one that in Malcolm’s mind I had failed. He was right though. I believe in the rule of law. If you start down that slippery slope, you take all of what makes us civilized with you.

At least, that was how I felt before this week.

“Jake?”

“Yes?”

“Do you really know how the Minors found Todd Sanderson?”

“I think so,” I said. “You keep some paperwork on Fresh Start, right?”

“Only on a web cloud. And you needed two of the three of us—Todd, Malcolm, or me—to access it.” He blinked, looked away, blinked some more. “I just realized. I’m the only one left. The paperwork is gone forever.”

“But there must be something physical you store, no?”

“Like what?” he asked.

“Like their last will and testament?”

“Well, yes, those, but they’re kept someplace where no one can find them.”

“You mean like a safety-deposit box on Canal Street?”

Jed’s mouth dropped open. “How can you know that?”

“It was broken into. Someone got into the safety-deposit boxes. I can’t say what happened for sure, but Natalie was still a huge priority for the Minor family. If you found her, it could mean big bucks. So my guess is, someone—the thieves, a cop on the take, whatever—recognized her name. They reported it to the Minors. The Minors saw that the box was taken out by a guy named Todd Sanderson who lived in Palmetto Bluff, South Carolina.”

“My God,” Jed said. “So they paid him a visit.”

“Yes.”

“Todd was tortured,” Jed said.

“I know.”

“They made him talk. A man can only stand so much pain. But Todd didn’t know where Natalie or anyone else was. See? He could only tell them what he knew.”

“Like about you and the retreat in Vermont,” I said.

Jed nodded. “That’s why we had to close it down. That’s why we had to run away and pretend that there was nothing there but a farm. Do you understand?”

“I do,” I said.

He looked back down at Malcolm’s body. “We need to bury him, Jake. You and me. Out here in this place he loved.”

And then I realized something else that chilled me to the bone. Jed could see it on my face.

“What?”

“Todd never got the chance to take the cyanide pill.”

“They probably surprised him.”

“Right, and if they tortured him and he gave up your name, it stands to reason that he gave up Malcolm’s name too. They probably sent men to Vero Beach. But Malcolm was already gone. He came up here to this cabin. The house would have been empty. But these guys don’t quit easily. They’d just found their first clue in six years—they weren’t about to just let it go. They would have asked questions and pored through personal records. Even if this land was still in his late wife’s name, they may have found this place.”

I thought about all those tire tracks outside.

“He’s dead,” I said, looking down at the bed. “He chose to kill himself, and judging by the lack of decay, he did it very recently. Why?”

“Oh God.” Jed saw it now too. “Because Minor’s guys found him.”

As he said those words, I heard cars pull up. It was so clear now. Minor’s men had been here already. Malcolm Hume had seen them coming and taken matters into his own hands.

So what would they do about that?

They’d have set a trap. They’d leave someone behind to stake out the house in case someone else showed up.

Jed and I both rushed to the window as the two black cars came to a stop. The doors opened. Five men with guns came out.

One of them was Danny Zuker.

Chapter 34

The men kept low and spread out.

Jed reached into his pocket and pulled out a pillbox. He opened it and tossed the pill inside to me.

“I don’t want this,” I said.

“I have the gun. I’ll try to hold them. You try to find a way to escape. But if you can’t . . .”

From outside we heard Danny call out. “Only one way out of this!” he shouted. “Come out with your hands up.”

We had both ducked down to the floor.

“You believe him?” Jed asked me.

“No.”

“Me neither. There’s no way they’re going to let us live. So all we’re doing right now is giving them time to set up.” He started to rise. “Find an escape route out the back, Jake. I’ll keep them busy.”

“What?”

“Just go!”

Without warning, Jed knocked out a windowpane and started to pull the trigger. Within seconds, return gunfire raked the side of the house and took out the rest of the window. Shards of glass fell on me.

“Go!” Jed shouted at me.

No reason to tell me a third time. I commando-crawled toward the back door. It was, I knew, my only chance. Jed started firing blindly, keeping his back against the wall. I headed into the kitchen, still moving low across the acrylic. I reached the back door.

I heard Jed let out a celebratory shout. “Nailed one!”

Great. Four to go. More gunfire. Heavier now. The walls were starting to give way, the bullets weakening and now penetrating the wood. From where I was, I saw Jed get hit once, then twice. I started back toward him.

“Don’t!” he shouted at me.

“Jed . . .”

“Don’t you dare! Get out now!”

I wanted to help him, but I could also see how foolhardy that would be. It wouldn’t help him. It would just be suicide. Jed managed to stand. He was heading for the front door.

“Okay!” he shouted out. “I surrender.”

Jed had the gun in his hand. He looked back at me, winked, gestured for me to keep going.

I glanced out the back window, preparing to make a break for it. The house was right up against a wooded area. I could go into those woods and just hope for the best. I didn’t have another plan. At least nothing that would help immediately. I took out my iPhone and flipped it on. There was service. I dialed 911 as I looked out the window.

One of the men was in the back on the left, covering the door. Damn.

“Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”

I told her quickly that there were shots being fired and at least two men hit. I gave her the address and put the phone down, keeping the line open. From behind me, I heard Danny Zuker shout, “Okay, throw the gun out first.”

I thought that I saw a smile on Jed’s face now. He was bleeding. I didn’t know how badly he was hit, if his current injuries were mortal or not, but Jed knew. Jed knew that his life was over no matter what he did and with that, there seemed to come a strange sense of peace.

Jed opened the door and just started firing. I heard another man call out in pain—maybe another one of Jed’s bullets had found its mark—and then I heard the hollow pop of automatic gunfire tearing into flesh. From my vantage point, I saw Jed’s body fly backward, arms dangling overhead as though in a macabre dance. He fell back into the house. More bullets hit him, jerking his lifeless body.

It was over. For him and probably for me.

Even if Jed had managed to kill two of them, three would still be alive and armed. What chance did I have? I calculated the odds in nanoseconds. Almost zilch. I had one chance, really. Stall. Stall until the police could get there. I thought about how far out we were, about that drive up the dirt road, about not seeing any municipal-type buildings within miles of this place.

The cavalry wouldn’t be arriving in time.

Still the Minors may want me alive.

I was their last chance to get information on Natalie. I could tap-dance a bit that way.

They were approaching the house. I looked for a place to hide.

Stall. Just stall.

But there was nowhere to go. I stood up and looked out the back door window. The man was there, just waiting for me. I sprinted across the kitchen and back into the bedroom. Malcolm hadn’t moved, but then again I hadn’t expected him to.

I could hear someone enter the cottage.

I threw open the bedroom window. What I was counting on here—and really it was my only shot—was that the man in back was watching the door. The bedroom window was on the side toward the right. From where the guy had been standing when I saw him from the kitchen, he wouldn’t be able to see this window.

From the main room, I heard Danny Zuker say, “Professor Fisher? We know you’re in here. It’ll be worse for you if you make us wait.”

The window shrieked when I opened it. Zuker and another henchman ran toward the sound. I saw them as I rolled out the window and started to sprint for the woods.

Gunfire erupted behind me.

So much for keeping me alive. I didn’t know if it was my imagination or reality, but I could swear that I felt bullets nipping at my side. I kept running. I didn’t turn around. I just kept . . .

Someone tackled me from the side.

It must have been the guy who’d been out back. He hit from the left, knocking us both down. I prepared a punch and delivered it hard to his face. He rocked back. I reeled back to deliver another one. Again it landed. He went slack.

But it was too late now.

Danny Zuker and the other henchman stood over us. They both pointed their guns down at me.

“You can live,” Zuker said simply. “Just tell me where she is.”

“I don’t know.”

“Then you’re worthless to me.”

It was over. I could see that now. The man who’d tackled me shook his head. He stood and grabbed his gun. There I was, lying on the ground, surrounded by three men, all with guns. There was no move I could make. There were no distant sirens coming to my rescue. One man stood on my left, the other—the one I had decked—stood on my right.

I looked up at Danny Zuker, who stayed a step back. I threw up one last Hail Mary: “You killed Archer Minor, didn’t you?”

That caught him off guard. I could see the befuddlement on his face. “What?”

“Someone had to quiet him,” I said, “and Maxwell Minor would never murder his own kid.”

“You’re crazy.”

The other two men exchanged a glance.

“Why else would you try so hard to find her?” I asked. “It’s been six years. You know she’d never testify.”

Danny Zuker shook his head. There was something akin to sadness on his face. “You don’t have a clue, do you?”

He raised the gun, almost reluctantly now. I had played my final card. I didn’t want to die like this, on the ground beneath them. I stood up, wondering what my final move would be, when it was made for me.

There was a single gunshot. The head of the man on my left exploded like a tomato under a heavy boot.

The rest of us turned toward the sound of the gunshot. I recovered the fastest. Letting the lizard brain take over again, I dived straight toward the man I’d already punched. He was closest to me, and he’d be weakest from my earlier blow.

I could get his gun.

But the man reacted with greater speed than I anticipated. His lizard brain at work too, I guess. He stepped back and took aim. I was too far away to reach him in time.

And then his head exploded in another crimson haze.

The blood splashed me in the face. Danny Zuker didn’t hesitate. He leapt behind me, using me as a shield. He wrapped his arm around my throat and put the gun against my head.

“Don’t move,” he whispered.

I didn’t. There was silence now. He stayed close to me, moving us back toward the house to keep himself protected.

“Show yourself,” Zuker shouted. “Show yourself or I’ll blow his brains out!”

There was a rustling sound. Zuker jerked my head to the right, making sure to keep my body blocking his. He turned me more toward the right—to where the rustling had originated. I looked out into the clearing.

My heart stopped.

Coming down the hill, gun still in her hand and aimed at us, was Natalie.

Chapter 35

Danny Zuker spoke first. “Well, well, look who’s here.”

My body had gone numb at the sight of her. Our eyes met—Natalie’s and mine—and the world exploded in a thousand different ways. It was one of the most powerful experiences of my life, this simple act of looking into the blue eyes of the woman I loved, and even now, even with a gun to my head, I felt oddly grateful. If he pulled the trigger, so be it. I had, in this single moment, been more alive than any time in the previous six years. If I were to die now—and, no, I didn’t want to, in fact, more than anything else I wanted to live and be with that woman—I’d die a more complete person, have lived a more complete life, than if I had died just a few moments earlier.

With the gun still trained on us, Natalie said, “Let him go.”

She never took her eyes off me.

“I don’t think so, sweetheart,” Zuker said.

“Let him go, and you can have me.”

I shouted, “No!”

Zuker drove the muzzle of the gun into the side of my neck. “Shut up.” Then to Natalie he said, “Why should I trust you?”

“If I cared more about myself than him,” she said, “I wouldn’t have revealed myself.”

Natalie kept her eyes on me. I wanted to protest. There was no way I would allow this exchange, but something in her look told me to keep still, at least for now. I thought about it. She was almost willing me to obey, to just let this play out the way she wanted.

Maybe, I thought, she wasn’t here alone. Maybe there were others. Maybe she had a plan.

“Okay then,” Zuker said, still hiding behind my body. “Put your gun down and I’ll let him go.”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“Oh?”

“We bring him out to his car. You put him in the driver’s seat. The moment he pulls away, I put the gun down.”

Zuker seemed to be thinking that over. “I put him in the car. You drop your weapon and he drives off.”

Natalie nodded again, still looking directly at me, almost willing me to obey. “Deal,” she said.

We started toward the front of the house. Natalie kept her distance, staying about thirty yards back from us. I wondered whether Cookie or Benedict or some other member of Fresh Start was nearby. Maybe they were waiting by the car, armed, ready to take Zuker out with a single bullet.

When we reached the car, Zuker took an angle so that the vehicle and my body were still shielding him. “Open the door,” he told me.

I hesitated.

He pressed the gun against my neck. “Open the door.”

I looked back at Natalie. She gave me a confident smile that reached into my chest and crushed it like an eggshell. As I slipped into the driver’s seat, I realized with mounting horror what she was doing.

There was no plan to save us both.

There were no other Fresh Start members who were going to intercede. There was no one hiding, waiting to pounce. Natalie had kept my attention, had offered up this hope in her eyes, so I wouldn’t fight back, so I wouldn’t make the sacrifice she was about to make for me.

To hell with that.

The car started up. Natalie began to lower her weapon. I had a second, no more, to make my move. It was suicide. I knew that. I knew that there was no way the two of us could survive this. That had been her thinking. One of us had to die. In the end, Jed and Benedict and Cookie had been right. I had messed up. I had stubbornly followed some love-conquers-all inner mantra, and now here we were, exactly where I was warned we would be, with Natalie facing death.

I wouldn’t let that happen.

Once I was in the car, Natalie stopped walking and turned her attention to Danny Zuker. Zuker, understanding that it was his turn, moved the gun away from my neck. He changed hands so that the weapon was too far away from me, sitting as I was, to make any kind of foolish move.

“Your turn,” Zuker said.

Natalie put her weapon on the ground.

Time was up. I had spent the seconds planning my exact move, the exact calculation, the element of surprise, all of it. Now I didn’t hesitate. Zuker would have time, I was fairly sure, to take a shot at me. That didn’t matter. He was going to have to defend himself. If he did that by shooting me, it would give Natalie the time to either run or, more likely, pick her own gun back off the ground and shoot.

No choice for me now. I wasn’t driving off, that was for sure.

Without warning, my left hand shot up high. I don’t think he expected that. Zuker had figured that if I did anything, I’d go for the gun. I grabbed his hair hard and pulled him toward me. As I predicted, Danny swung the gun in my direction.

With my left hand, I pulled his face closer to mine. He expected my right to go for the gun.

It didn’t.

Instead, using the right hand, I jammed the cyanide pill Jed had given me into Zuker’s mouth. His eyes widened in terror as he realized what I had done. That made him hesitate—the realization that there was cyanide in his mouth and that if he didn’t get it out, he was a dead man. He tried to spit it out but my hand was there. He bit down hard, making me scream out, but my hand stayed still. At the same time he fired the gun at my head.

I ducked away.

The bullet hit my shoulder. More agony.

Danny started to convulse, taking aim for another shot. But he never got that one off. Natalie’s first bullet caught him in the back of the head. She fired twice more, but there was no need.

I fell back, my hand on my throbbing shoulder, trying to stop the blood. I waited for her to come over to me.

But she didn’t. She stayed where she was.

I had never seen anything more beautiful and crushing than the expression on her face. A tear ran down her cheek. She just slowly shook her head.

“Natalie?”

“I have to go,” she said.

My eyes went wide. “No.” Now, finally, I could hear the sirens. I was losing blood and feeling faint. None of that mattered. “Let me go with you. Please.”

Natalie winced. Her tears came heavier now. “I can’t live if something happens to you. Do you get that? It’s why I ran the first time. I can live with you heartbroken. I can’t live with you dead.”

“I’m not alive without you.”

The sirens were growing closer.

“I have to go,” she said, through her tears.

“No . . .”

“I will always love you, Jake. Always.”

“Then be with me.” I could hear the plea in my voice.

“I can’t. You know that. Don’t follow me. Don’t look for me. Keep your promise this time.”

I shook my head. “Not a chance,” I said.

She turned and started back up the hill.

“Natalie!” I called out.

But the woman I loved just kept walking out of my life. Again.

Chapter 36

ONE YEAR LATER

A student in the back of the room raises his hand. “Professor Weiss?”

“Yes, Kennedy?” I say.

That’s my name now. Paul Weiss. I teach at a large university in New Mexico. I can’t say the name of it for security reasons. With all the dead bodies at the lake, the powers that be realized that I’d be best off in witness protection. So here I am, out in the west. The altitude still gets to me sometimes, but overall I like it out here. That surprises me. I always thought I’d be an East Coast guy, but life is about making adjustments, I guess.

I miss Lanford, of course. I miss my old life. Benedict and I still stay in touch, even though we shouldn’t. We use an e-mail drop box and never hit the send button. We created an e-mail account with AOL (old-school). We write each other messages and just leave them in the draft section. Periodically we go in and check it.

The big news in Benedict’s life is that the drug cartel that was after him is gone. They were wiped out in some kind of turf battle. In short, he is free at last to return to Marie-Anne, but when he last checked her Facebook status, it had changed from “in a relationship” to “married.” There were photographs of her wedding to Kevin all over both their Facebook pages.

I’m urging him to tell her the truth anyway. He says he won’t. He says he doesn’t want to mess up her life.

But life is messy, I told him.

Deep thought, right?

The rest of the pieces of the puzzle have finally come together for me. It took a long while. One of the Minor henchmen that Jed shot survived. His testimony confirmed what I had suspected. The bank robbers known as the Invisibles broke into the Canal Street bank. In Todd Sanderson’s box, there were both last wills and testaments and passports. The Invisibles had taken the passports, figuring that they could be resold on the black market. One of them recognized Natalie’s name—the Minors were still actively looking for her, even after six years—and reported it to them. The box was in Todd Sanderson’s name, so Danny Zuker and Otto Devereaux paid him a visit.

You know where it went from there. Or you know most of it.

But a lot of things didn’t add up. I had raised one with Danny Zuker right before his life ended: Why were the Minors so consumed with finding Natalie? She had made it pretty clear that she wouldn’t testify. Why stir that up, flush her out, when the end result could very well be her running back to the police? I had at one point surmised that it was really Danny Zuker behind it all, that he had killed Archer Minor and wanted to make sure that the one person who could tell Maxwell Minor that fact was dead. But that didn’t really add up either, especially when I saw the befuddlement on his face when I accused him of the crime.

“You don’t have a clue, do you?”

That was what Danny Zuker had said. He’d been right. But I’d slowly started putting it together, especially when I started to wonder about the central question left here, the incident that started it all:

Where was Natalie’s father?

I figured out the answer to that almost a year ago. Two days before they sent me to New Mexico, I visited Natalie’s mother again at the Hyde Park Assisted Living facility. I wore a cheesy disguise. (Now my disguise is simpler: I’ve shaved my head. Gone are the unruly professorial locks of my youth. My dome gleams. If I wore a gold earring, you’d mistake me for Mr. Clean.)

“I need the truth this time,” I said to Sylvia Avery.

“I told you.”

I could see people needing new identities and vanishing because they’d been accused of pedophilia or had upset members of a drug cartel or had been battered by brutal husbands or had witnessed a mob hit. But I didn’t see why a man involved in a college cheating scandal would have to vanish for life—even now, even after Archer Minor was dead.

“Natalie’s dad never ran away, did he?”

She didn’t reply.

“He was murdered,” I said.

Sylvia Avery seemed too weak to protest anymore. She sat there, still as a stone.

“You told Natalie that her father would never, ever, abandon her.”

“He wouldn’t,” she said. “He loved her so. He loved Julie too. And me. Aaron was such a good man.”

“Too good,” I said. “Always seeing just the black-and-white.”

“Yes.”

“When I told you that Archer Minor was dead, you said, ‘Good riddance.’ Was he the one who killed your husband?”

She lowered her head.

“There’s no one who can hurt any of you anymore,” I said, which was only partially true. “Did Archer Minor kill your husband, or was it someone his father sent?”

And then she said it: “It was Archer himself.”

I nodded. I had figured that.

“He came to the house with a gun,” Sylvia said. “He demanded that Aaron give him the papers that proved he’d cheated. You see, he really did want to escape his father’s shadow and if word got out he cheated . . .”

“He’d be exactly like his father.”

“Yes. I begged Aaron to listen to him. He wouldn’t. He thought Archer was bluffing. So Archer put the gun against Aaron’s head and . . .” She closed her eyes. “He smiled when he did it. That’s what I remember most. Archer Minor was smiling. He told me to give him the papers or I’d be next. I gave them to him, of course. Then two men came by. Men who worked for his father. They took Aaron’s body away. Then one of the men sat me down. He said if I ever told anyone about this, they’d do horrible things to my girls. They wouldn’t just kill them, he said. They’d do horrible things to them first. He kept stressing that. He told me to say that Aaron ran off. So I did. I kept the lie up for all those years to protect my girls. You understand that, don’t you?”

“I do,” I said sadly.

“I had to make my poor Aaron be the bad guy. So his daughters wouldn’t keep asking about him.”

“But Natalie wouldn’t buy it.”

“She kept pressing.”

“And like you said, the lie had darkened her. The idea that her father had abandoned her.”

“That’s a horrible thing for a young girl to think. I should have come up with another way. But what?”

“So she pressed and she pressed,” I said.

“She wouldn’t leave it alone. She headed back to Lanford and talked to Professor Hume.”

“But Hume didn’t know either.”

“No. But she kept asking questions.”

“And that could have gotten her in trouble.”

“Yes.”

“So you decided to tell her the truth. Her father hadn’t run away with a coed. He hadn’t run away because he was afraid of the Minors. You finally told her the full story—that Archer Minor had murdered her father in cold blood while smiling.”

Sylvia Avery didn’t nod. She didn’t have to. I said good-bye then and left.

So now I knew why Natalie was in that high-rise late that night. Now I knew why Natalie had gone to visit Archer Minor when no one else would be around. Now I knew why Maxwell Minor never stopped looking for Natalie. He isn’t worried about her testifying.

He’s a father who wants to avenge his son’s murder.

I don’t know this for sure. I don’t know if Natalie shot Archer Minor with a smile on her face or if the gun went off accidentally or if Archer Minor made threats when she confronted him or if it was self-defense. I don’t even ask.

The old me would have cared. The new me doesn’t.

Class ends. I start across the commons. The Santa Fe sky is a blue like no other. I shade my eyes and keep walking.

That day a year ago, with the bullet still in my shoulder, I watched Natalie start to walk away. I shouted, “Not a chance” when she asked me to promise not to follow. She wouldn’t listen to me or stop. So I got out of the car. The pain in my shoulder was nothing compared with the pain of her leaving me again. I ran toward her. I wrapped my arms, even the one aching from the bullet wound, around her and pulled her close. Our eyes squeezed shut. I hung on to her, wondering if I had ever felt such contentment before. She started to cry. I pulled her even closer. She lowered her head into my chest. For a moment, she tried to pull away. But only for a moment. She knew that this time I wouldn’t let her go.

No matter what she might or might not have done.

I still haven’t let her go.

Up ahead, a beautiful woman named Diana Weiss wears a wedding band that matches mine. She has decided to teach her art class outside on this glorious day. She moves from student to student, commenting on their work, offering guidance.

She knows that I know, even though we’ve never talked about it. I wonder whether that was part of her leaving the first time, if she felt as though I could never live with the truth about what she’d done. Maybe I couldn’t back then.

I can now.

Diana Weiss looks up at me as I approach. Her smile shames the sun. Today my beautiful wife is glowing even more than normal. I may be thinking that about her because I’m biased. Or I may be thinking that because she is seven months pregnant with our child.

Her class ends. The students linger before slowly drifting away. She takes my hand when we’re finally alone, looks into my eyes, and says, “I love you.”

“I love you too,” I say.

She smiles up at me. The gray has no chance against that smile. It vanishes in a wonderful haze of bright color.

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