“What are you saying?”
Nick looked to Thorne and got a supportive, understanding nod. “God’s honest truth, I don’t think you’ve got a chance. It’s too big. I came here with the idea of staying away from the law. Now you’re seeking them out.” He broke eye contact. “I just can’t do that.”
“It’s stupid, Jake,” Thorne repeated. “Listen to him. There’s got to be a better way.”
Jake just stared. “And searching for better ways takes more time than I’ve got.” He felt himself flush with anger as he realized they were abandoning him. Well, to hell with them. He’d make it all right, with them or without them. He looked to Thorne again. “Let me have the keys, then.”
Thorne paused for a long moment before hesitantly handing them over.
Jake bounced the keys in his palm. “Some tough guy you turned out to be,” he said bitterly. When his eyes landed on Nick, he just broke his gaze and headed for the door.
As Nick listened to the quiet click of Jake’s rubber-soled shoes disappearing down the hallway, he looked to Thorne and felt ashamed. It was foolish, he knew-and sentimental-but he just couldn’t let Jake down like this. Not again.
“God help me,” he groaned, rising from his chair. “In for a dime, in for a dollar, right, Thorne?” He had to hurry to catch up.
Alone, finally, in the sprawling house, Thorne poured himself a drink and reached for the telephone. It was time to catch his boss up on everything that had happened.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
The guards wouldn’t tell Carolyn a thing. She’d begged. She’d cried. Still, no one would tell her how Travis was doing. She knew he was alive, but beyond that, they said nothing. More precisely, they insisted they had no information. Of course, if she found a way to be more forthcoming with details about Jake, well, they might just be able to scavenge up a tidbit or two. Assholes.
She lay on the concrete shelf that served as a cot in her isolation cell, bathed in the yellow light cast by the wire-reinforced fixture overhead. She’d unrolled her mattress, such as it was, but the threadbare Army blanket and plastic pillow remained folded and stacked on her bed, serving as a convenient footrest. Officially, her celebrity status was responsible for her isolation, but she knew that it was just more mind games.
She worried how much longer she could hold out. Fear was hard to manage when you were all alone, and the fact that her tormentors took such pleasure from her fear made it that much worse. She tried to focus on Jake and on all she knew he must be doing to get her out. They’d been married nearly fifteen years now, and he’d never once let her down. God only knew how he’d do it, but she had to keep believing in him. Without that hope, there was nothing.
She’d heard over the years that one of the worst adjustments to life in prison was the constant noise. The air handlers thrummed endlessly, keeping the place cold enough to hang meat and preventing even the few quiet moments from being truly quiet. Already, she missed the rushing sound of an autumn breeze, the silence of a snowy night. Over time, though, she knew she could adjust to mechanical noise. It was the human noise that frightened her.
She was all alone in her little four-cell isolation wing, yet the sounds of other inmates still reverberated off the walls. People conversed at the top of their lungs, discussing issues as mundane as the weather and as newsy as the addition of the Newark terrorist to the jail’s population. “You ain’t seen terror yet, missy,” one inmate yelled. “Wait till you get out here alone with us! You’ll wish you had some nerve gas!”
Carolyn just closed her eyes tighter and tried not to think about the future. These were tough, violent people, who’d been led to believe that she was just as tough as they. Once they found out how truly terrified she was, they’d eat her alive. The thought of institutional violence, with no place to run, made her stomach seize.
You can’t think that way, she silently told herself. You’ve had dark days before. But never a day as dark as this.
She tried to think of Travis. When dark days had turned bright in the past, it had almost always been his doing. He had that smile, and that knack for knowing how to make her laugh; just as he knew exactly which buttons could launch her into orbit. She closed her eyes tight and concentrated just on the smile-the way his front teeth crossed ever so slightly, and the way his whole face lit up at any punch line involving a body part south of the navel.
When she concentrated on these things, the pain in her heart eased up a bit, and she nearly allowed herself a smile.
Then she saw him back inside the car, drooling and frothing, struggling for every breath. What he must have been thinking of her as she wrestled with him in the water! Why couldn’t he understand? Why did he have to be so angry at the end?
I killed my own son.
No! He wasn’t dead, dammit. For all Carolyn knew, he was as good as gold again, and the jailers were keeping it from her just to torture her some more.
She found herself thinking back to the time three years ago, in Baltimore, when he stepped on a bottle, barefoot, and opened up a gash under the arch of his foot. The poor kid howled, begging her to stop as she dug the grit and dirt out of the wound. What he needed was a hospital; a place to get stitched up. But they couldn’t take him to an emergency room. Too many cops there. If it had been life-threatening, sure. And probably, if he had torn any ligaments or broken any bones. But something as mundane-as painful-as torn flesh just wasn’t worth the risk. The wound took weeks to heal, hobbling him well into the winter of that year.
Carolyn tried now to make the memories go away. What kind of parent would let her child suffer like that?
And now he was alone.
A noise at her cell door startled Carolyn back to reality, and she sat up quickly, swinging her feet to the floor. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands, surprised she’d actually fallen asleep. The lock turned, and the steel door swung open, revealing a Wagnerian jail matron named Gladys, in the company of a rugged-looking older man in the requisite gray pinstripes of a government cop, carrying the standard-issue leather briefcase.
“Got a visitor for you, killer,” Gladys said. “FBI.”
“Agent Wiggins,” the man said with exaggerated patience, as if this weren’t the first time he’d had to remind her of his name.
Gladys eyed him like he smelled bad. “Right. She gives you any trouble, give us a yell.” She closed the door on the way out. And locked it.
Carolyn eyed Wiggins cautiously, fearfully. He had a predatory look about him that made her instinctively uncomfortable. “What time is it?” she asked.
He seemed a little surprised by the question, as if such details as the time of day were somehow irrelevant. After dropping a beat, he looked at his watch. “A little after one,” he said.
She had an instinct for people, and something about this guy put her on edge. That Rivers lady she’d sparred with earlier in the day had been a certifiable jerk, but in an arrogant, professional sort of way. She had a job to do, and that job was to put Carolyn away forever. With her, the rules of engagement were clear. Wiggins was different. He frightened her. And in a distant sort of way, she’d have sworn she’d seen him before. “I’ve already said all I’m going to say,” she growled, masking her fear with testiness.
He seemed amused as he checked his reflection in the stainless-steel plate that served as a mirror over the toilet. After adjusting the knot in his tie and smoothing an errant hair, he helped himself to a corner of her cot. “Well, Mrs. Donovan,” he said softly, “what you have to say really doesn’t interest me much.”
She narrowed her gaze. It was coming back to her. Something in the intensity of his eyes, his face. She considered calling the matron but abandoned the notion right away. What would she say to her?
He caught her quick glance toward the door and turned to look. “Oh, don’t do something stupid, Carolyn,” he said. “Fact is, you’re in one hell of a mess. If you ask me, you’d have been much better off had you stayed in hiding.”