The Survivor: A Novel Part 19

The female officer peered across at Nate from beneath perfect curled bangs. "So he's a friend."

"Old friend." Yuri grinned.

Nate's smile felt like a baring of his teeth. "Neighbors around here get a bit jumpy."

The cops withdrew quickly and with annoyance, doors slamming, engines coughing. The patrol cars splashed off through puddles, on to the next complaint. The quiet rea.s.serted itself. A slight movement across the street as Mrs. Alizadeh drifted from view.

Yuri tilted his large head to Janie, breaking the calm standoff. "Smart lady."

"Why are you here?" Nate said. "Just to f.u.c.k things up?"

A key fob hung over the edge of Yuri's breast pocket. "You went to bank today."

Between Abara and Pavlo's thugs, Nate wondered how many people were following him at any given time.

"You retrieve item?" Yuri asked.

Nate pictured Cielle inside at the table, clutching the envelope. Her fierce words earlier: You can't decide this for me.

"No." He had to force out the word. "Not yet. I'm maneuvering into position."

Yuri mulled this over. "Today is Friday. Bank closed tomorrow. You must deliver Sunday night."

"As you boys pointed out, I'm a VIP at that bank now. Special rules for the hero."

"How do you plan to get?"

"This isn't a joint effort. You'll have it by the deadline. If you can manage not to get arrested between now and then."

Yuri nodded once, severely, and lumbered away, vanis.h.i.+ng past the Kerners' hedge.

Janie's arm fell from around Nate's side. "We could have just handed him that list." Her voice, heavy with dread.

They walked back inside in silence.

The door had no sooner swung shut behind them than Nate caught the scent. "You smell something burning?"

"Cielle?" Janie jogged into the house. "Cielle?"

Nate ran after her, a wisp of smoke coming clear in the kitchen. Cielle was leaning over the sink, her face flushed with emotion. A steady stream ran from the faucet.

"What'd you do?" Janie yelled. "What did you-"

Cielle opened one plump fist, and her boyfriend's skull-and-crossbones Zippo fell to the tile. "I couldn't do it. I couldn't let them get killed."

With horror Nate noted the empty envelope on the counter. A fleck of paper flew up from the sink, alight, orange turning to black. On weightless legs he moved forward.

The sheet of paper was no more than a delta of wet ash around the drain.

Chapter 28.

Exhausted, Cielle shuffled toward her bed and sat. She was fully dressed-sweatpants and a black hoodie she wore low across her shoulder blades, like a shawl. She hugged her midsection, her eyes glazed.

Nate grasped her arms gently and lowered her to the pillow. She let him. He tugged the sheets up over her. Janie sat at Cielle's desk, fist propping up her chin, equally catatonic.

"What did I do?" Cielle asked hoa.r.s.ely.

Nate could feel his fingernails digging into the flesh of his forearm. "Something brave," he said.

"Did I just kill myself?"

"No," he said. "It'll be all right."

"How will it be all right?"

"Because I'll make it all right."

Her blinks grew longer. "I screwed everything up. It was my choice. So I get it if you want to leave now."

"I'm never leaving you again."

Her face s.h.i.+fted, a softening. "What do you want?" she asked, not unkindly. "From me?"

"The honest truth?"

"Is there any other kind?"

"So many." He wanted to pet her s.h.i.+ny dark hair to soothe her to sleep as he used to when she was young, but he restrained himself. Instead he kneaded his palm, working the tiny bones, chasing the burn from the muscle. He was also, he realized, working up the courage to respond. He cleared his throat quietly. "I want the chance to mean something to you again."

But she was asleep.

He stared across at her doorway, all those pen marks notching off her height, Janie's scrawl recording a progression of key dates. First day of preschool. Fifth birthday. Elementary-school graduation. Would there be more? College, a wedding? He pictured the bulge of Yuri's muscles as he'd hefted the rescue saw, tendons s.h.i.+fting beneath pale skin and swaths of arm hair. An obscenity.

Janie's words were m.u.f.fled by her hand. "Are you scared to death?"

"No," he lied.

He rose and walked down the hall into the master bathroom. Shut the door and sat on the floor. He pressed both hands over his mouth and set the back of his head against the full-length mirror behind the door. Pain radiated from his forearm into the crook of his elbow, tendrils of fire. His left hand had gone stiff and dead against his lips, and he squeezed his eyes shut and pictured those marks again in Cielle's doorway, how they stopped about waist-high. Panic unfolded inside his chest, a poisonous flower blooming. His ribcage heaved, and he pressed his hands tighter against his mouth.

When he dared, he opened his eyes and was not surprised to see Charles sitting on the closed lid of the toilet. His entrails were exposed, his hands charred and smoking, and for once he was not smiling. A feeling of overwhelming helplessness gripped Nate, the same as he'd felt in the car outside Charles's childhood house, watching Grace Brightbill bustle over the dishes, knowing he was supposed to walk to the front door to serve her son's death notification. The same he'd felt in this very bathroom, sitting where Charles now sat, unable to move his stubborn body into the next room to comfort his sobbing wife.

"What do I do now?" he asked his old friend.

"You know what you need to do," Charles said. "You need to keep going."

"My f.u.c.king hand hurts, Charles. I'm losing my body."

"You can do this."

"No. I can't. I'm the guy who froze on the helicopter-"

"No," Charles said. "You're the guy who dove into the waves to rescue a drowning girl when no one else would."

Janie knocked on the door, vibrating the mirror beneath Nate's shoulders. Charles lifted his face to the sound, smiled enigmatically.

Fear invaded Janie's voice. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," Nate said, rising. "I'm okay."

Straining to steady his hand, Nate spooned tomato soup to his lips. When he'd admitted, under Janie's line of questioning, that he hadn't eaten in a day and a half, she'd heated some Campbell's. If ever there was a time for comfort food.

In his uncertain grip, the spoon handle rattled against the brim of the bowl, so he set it down gently. "We have forty-eight hours until that list is due in Shevchenko's hands," he said. "Our only advantage is that we know now I'm not gonna be able to deliver it."

"Two days to come up with an alternate game plan."

"Let's put you and Cielle on a plane tomorrow. Get you out of here. But we'll be cautious as h.e.l.l. We'll buy tickets the day of, a few hours before the flight. Doesn't matter how much it costs. And we'll leave the house separately, at different times."

"And if Shevchenko finds out anyway?"

Nate pressed the edges of his teeth together. "The deal was that I wouldn't flee. Not you. I'll stay right here in plain sight."

"Doing what?"

"That FBI agent, Abara-he suspects me. But he also knows there's more to the story."

"So you'll go to him?"

"Right now what do I have? A story about a list that went up in smoke? I've got to get him something concrete. Something definitive enough that he can move on Shevchenko and his men and arrest them immediately. Something serious enough that they'll be held with no bail."

"Which means a murder charge," Janie said.

"Right. I need to find out why Shevchenko wants those people dead. I connect him to that murdered schoolteacher or those other names, I have something to bring to Abara that might actually save us. Shevchenko goes to prison, you and Cielle go into Witness Protection or whatever."

"Witness Protection. Jesus." Janie slid the pot from stove to sink and threw the faucet handle. Steam rose. "How are you gonna go about this now that Cielle burned the list? We don't even have the names anymore."

"We've got three of them." Nate slid his computer over and clicked on the history function in the browser. Sure enough, there were the last three Google searches. Patrice McKenna, Brentwood. Luis Millan, Marina del Rey. And Wendy Moreno, Westchester. "Tomorrow I'll start here."

Janie nudged his bowl closer to him. "Eat more."

He reached for the spoon, but his hand was vibrating, the strain of typing having taken a toll. He withdrew it, hiding it in his lap, but not before Janie had noticed. Again. She came around the counter, moving close enough that she pressed against his knees.

She beckoned, a nurse's impatient gesture. "Lemme see."

"It's fine."

"Come on. I owe you. That day on the beach."

He mustered a grin. "The tidal wave in the tropical monsoon."

"The very one. You saved my life."

"Nah," he said. "You saved mine."

Her teeth tugged at her lush lower lip, emotion working on her face. "Don't get philosophical. It doesn't suit you."

Their proximity made itself suddenly known. Her thighs pus.h.i.+ng lightly against his knees. Her standing, him sitting on the stool, her mouth slightly higher than his, but close. They searched each other as if trying to read some hidden code. He prayed silently that she wouldn't step away, and she didn't.

She twisted the engagement ring around her finger, then became aware she was doing it. Her eyes moved to the diamond. "I think I knew somewhere," she said slowly, "even when I said yes, but it made sense, kind of, and then it was this thing, gaining momentum...." Again her gaze found Nate's. "I'm glad you're here." She took a half breath. "He was never you."

He leaned forward on the stool, bringing his lips to hers. Tender, close-mouthed. She softened into him. Her fingers went to his cheeks, but then she stiffened, shrugging up and out of his embrace. "Sorry. Look, with everything going on..."

"What?" he prompted.

"What if this isn't real?"

"It's real," he said.

She smiled sadly, taking a few backward steps before turning for the stairs.

Chapter 29.

High-end condos sprouted up along the water's edge in Marina del Rey, st.u.r.dy structures of tinted gla.s.s, rounded by a scalloping of balconies. The weekend was getting into swing, sorority girls shuffling from juice bars, surfers pedaling beach cruisers, their longboards tucked under tanned arms. Wafting inland from the small-boat harbor, the breeze carried salt and the faint sewer tinge of low tide.

Lincoln Boulevard ran straight through the cla.s.s divide, the apartments to the east severed from the ocean view and the organic cafes. The complex where Luis Millan lived, at least according to several online directories, was three stories high, with bubbling pink stucco and wedding-cake railings. Work trucks proliferated in the parking lot, which backed on a body shop. Window air conditioners cantilevered out into s.p.a.ce, dripping water and evoking calamity of the Looney Tunes variety.

After looping around the block a few times to ensure he wasn't being followed, Nate climbed the first flight of stairs, double-checked the address, and rang the bell. He had yet to land on a point of entry for the conversation to come, but having had plenty of practice knocking on doors and delivering bad news, he figured he'd wing it.

The guy who answered wore a porkpie hat, Bermuda shorts, and a V-necked unders.h.i.+rt. His facial hair was delicate and elaborate-soul patch, thin ridge lining either side of the jaw, strip along the upper lip that could have been stenciled on using eyeliner. His gold box-chain necklace looked like it had fallen out of a vending machine in 1983, all the more p.r.o.nounced given that it was strung around a pillowy cervical brace holding his head regally erect. Though he was slight, his freckled shoulders bulged like softb.a.l.l.s, ma.s.ses of sinewy muscle. Two men on a couch were playing Xbox, working joysticks sophisticated enough to land a fighter jet.

"Luis Millan?"

The guy nodded. "That's me."

"Can we talk a minute? Alone?"