“I won’t die,” he said and cleared his throat. “And I won’t betray you. Because if I do betray you”—and he was as sure of this as he’d ever been of anything—“I definitely will die.”
And she smiled at him, her teeth the white of ivory in the night.
Then she peeled off the sweatshirt and came to him, brown and beautiful and shaking from fear.
“When I was fourteen,” she told Jay that night as she lay beside him, “I looked just like my mother had. And my father noticed.”
“And acted upon it?” Jay said.
“What do you think?”
“Trevor give you his speech about grief?” Jay asked us as the waitress brought us two more coffees and another beer. “The one about grief being carnivorous?”
“Yeah,” Angie said.
Jay nodded. “Gave me the same speech when he hired me.” He held his hands out in front of him on the table, turned them back and forth. “Grief isn’t carnivorous,” he said. “Grief is my hands.”
“Your hands,” Angie said.
“I can feel her flesh in them,” he said. “Still. And the smells?” He tapped his nose. “Sweet Jesus. The scent of sand on her skin or the salt in the air coming through the screens of that fisherman’s shack? Grief, I swear to God, doesn’t live in the heart. It lives in the senses. And sometimes, all I want to do is cut off my nose so I can’t smell her, hack my fingers off at the joint.”
He looked at us, as if suddenly realizing we were there.
“You son of a bitch,” Angie said and her voice cracked as tears glistened on her cheekbones.
“Shit,” Jay said. “I forgot. Phil. Angie, I’m sorry.”
She waved away his hand and wiped her face with a cocktail napkin.
“Angie, really, I—”
She shook her head. “It’s just sometimes, I hear his voice and the sound of it is so clear, I’d swear he’s sitting beside me. And for the rest of the day, that’s all I can hear. Nothing else.”
I knew better than to reach for her hand, but she surprised me by suddenly reaching for mine.
I closed my thumb over hers and she leaned into me.
So this, I wanted to say to Jay, is what you felt with Desiree.
It was Jay who came up with the idea to rip off the money Jeff Price had stolen from Grief Release.
Trevor Stone had made his threats, and Jay believed him, but he also knew that Trevor didn’t have long to live. With two hundred thousand dollars, Jay and Desiree might not be able to hide deep enough to elude Trevor’s grasp for six months.
But with over two million, they could elude him for six years.
Desiree didn’t want anything to do with it. Price, she told Jay, had tried to kill her when she found out about the money he’d stolen. She’d only survived by cold-cocking him with a fire extinguisher, then bolting from their hotel room at the Ambassador in such a rush, she’d left behind every piece of clothing she owned.
Jay said, “But, honey, you were casing the hotel again when we met.”
“Because I was desperate. And alone. I’m not desperate anymore, Jay. And I’m not alone. And you have two hundred thousand dollars. We can run on that.”
“But how far?” Jay said. “He’ll find us. It’s not just the running that matters. We can run to Guyana. We can run to the Eastern bloc even, but we won’t have enough money left over to buy off people so they’ll answer questions right when Trevor sends people looking.”
“Jay,” she said, “he’s dying. How many more people can he send? It took you over three weeks to find me, and I left a trail, because I wasn’t sure anyone would be coming after me.”
“I left a trail,” he said. “And it’ll be a hell of a lot easier for someone to find me and you than it was for me to find just you. I left reports behind, and your father knows I’m in Florida.”
“It’s all about money,” she said, her voice soft, her eyes refusing to meet his. “Fucking money, as if that’s all there is in the world. As if it’s anything more than paper.”
“It is more than paper,” Jay said. “It’s power. And power moves things and hides things and creates opportunities. And if we don’t take down this douche bag, Price, someone else will because he’s stupid.”
“And dangerous,” Desiree said. “He’s dangerous. Don’t you get that? He’s killed people. I’m sure of it.”
“So have I,” Jay said. “So have I.”
But he couldn’t convince her.
“She was twenty-three,” he said to us. “You know? A kid. I’d forget that a lot, but she had a kid’s way of looking at the world, even after all the shit she’d been through. She kept thinking that somehow everything would just work out, all by itself. The world, she was sure, had a happy ending in it for her somewhere. And she wasn’t going to have anything to do with all that money that had caused all this shit in the first place.”
So Jay began to tail Price again. But Price never went near the money as far as Jay could tell. He had his meetings with his drug dealer friends, and Jay bugged Price’s room and ascertained that they were all concerned about a boat lost at sea off the Bahamian coast.
“That boat that sank the other day?” Angie said. “The one that sent all the heroin up onto the beaches?”
Jay nodded.
So Price was worried now, but he never went near the money as far as Jay could tell.
While Jay was out tailing Price, Desiree would read. The tropics, Jay noticed, had given her a taste for the surrealists and the sensualists he’d always favored himself, and he’d come home to find her lost in Toni Morrison or Borges, García Márquez or Isabelle Allende, the poetry of Neruda. In the fisherman’s shack, they’d cook fish Cajun-style and boil shellfish, fill the tiny space with the smell of salt and cayenne pepper, and then they’d make love. After, they’d go outside and sit by the ocean, and she’d tell him stories from whatever she was reading that day, and Jay would feel as if he were rereading the books himself, as if she were the writer, sitting beside him and spinning fantastical yarns into the darkening air. And then they’d make love again.
Until one morning Jay woke to find that his alarm clock had never gone off and Desiree wasn’t in bed beside him.
There was a note:
Jay,
I think I know where the money is. It matters to you, so I guess it matters to me. I’m going to get it. I’m scared, but I love you, and I think you’re right. We wouldn’t be able to hide long without it, would we? If I’m not back by ten a.m., please come get me.