“That from Lucy?”
“It’s business. Boring.”
“You changed the text alert sound? It sounds different.”
“I don’t know. You want some coffee?”
She gave him a quick look of surprise. “Yes, please.” She looked at him and smiled.
“Just this once,” Danny added. He rose and got down a Winnie-the-Pooh mug from the cabinet and filled it three-quarters of the way with coffee. “You can add your own milk and sugar.”
“Okay.” She poured some Lactaid milk until it was as light as coffee ice cream. She stirred in three teaspoons of sugar. “You sure you guys weren’t fighting?”
“We’re fine,” Danny said. He’d tell her when it felt less raw. “Get a move on. You don’t want to be late.”
“Let’s go,” Danny called out fifteen minutes later.
He jangled his car keys. Abby was still in the bathroom, doing whatever teenage girls do in the morning that takes them so long.
“Boogie, move your butt.”
The bathroom door opened. Abby’s face was different. It was twisted in what at first looked like intense curiosity, but something about her expression made Danny look twice. Anger?
“Where’s her toothbrush?” she said.
“What are you talking-?”
“Lucy. Lucy’s toothbrush. Her makeup. It’s gone. It’s all gone.”
Danny couldn’t think of what to say beyond, “It is?”
“You broke up.” An accusation.
Danny sighed. “Can we not get into this right now? You’re going to be late for school.”
“You lied to me!”
“It’s not your business.”
“Not my business? All the times you’ve told me to treat her like a member of the family? ‘She loves you, Abby. She’s part of our family, you should treat her like that.’ And now you’re freaking lying to me?”
“Abby. Boogie. We’ll talk later. Not now.”
“No!” Abby threw something at him, something small and hard. A hairbrush. It missed him by a couple of feet.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Abby, what the hell are you doing?”
“Sure, why not lie to me the same way you lied about Mom.”
“Huh?”
“You said she had an infection. An infection.” She was crying now, her face red and distorted.
“Abby-”
“You made me go to camp!”
“You wanted to go to camp. Mommy wanted you to go to camp.”
“I was kayaking and swimming when Mommy was dying. Oh my God.” Her voice had gotten high and tiny and constricted.
“Baby,” he said. He went to hug her and she pushed him away. He went numb.
Tears dripped from Abby’s cheeks. Her nose was running. It tore Danny apart to see her like this. “Like it wasn’t my business Mom had breast cancer. Like I couldn’t hear the truth.”
Crying now, too, Danny said, “Abby, sweetie, no. That wasn’t it at all. Mommy wanted you to be happy for as long as possible.”
She said something, but Danny couldn’t make out the words. All he heard was “happy?”
“Honey,” he said. “I lied to you because Mommy asked me to.”
And then it was out.
Pass the buck right back to your dead wife, he thought. Blame her. She’s not around to defend herself.
Did it make any difference that it was true?
This time when Danny tried to hug her, Abby didn’t fight him. She didn’t hug back, not really, but she allowed herself to be hugged for a long time. His shirt was hot and damp from his daughter’s tears.
Ten minutes later he called Jay Poskanzer, the criminal defense attorney.
“Jay,” he said, “I need a little help.”
“On what?”
“It’s about the DEA guys I’ve been dealing with.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Yeah. I want out.”
60
The terror Danny had felt in Aspen at the side of the mountain had scarcely lessened its grip on him.
Whatever the reason behind that nightmarish mutilation, it might as well have been done for his sake alone. It was a warning, that’s what it was. A glimpse of his future.
But it was Abby’s tears that had finally decided it for him: He had to get out. The DEA agents would not let up until he met an equally grisly end. To them it made no difference; he’d be a casualty of a long and brutal war.
He could predict what they’d say. No turning back now. Toothpaste’s out of the tube. Hang in there; keep the faith. We’ll take care of you.
They’d say whatever it took, make whatever threats they could, to keep him reporting on Tom Galvin, trying to incriminate him. But he couldn’t, wouldn’t, do it anymore. He couldn’t be responsible for putting the guy in prison. Or getting him murdered, more likely.
A loving father of three kids who’d never done him any harm, who’d tried to bail him out, who was himself trapped like Danny was trapped. Lucy was right. He’d made a terrible mistake.
And now he had to undo it.
Force the DEA to back off. However he had to do it.
So he sat in front of Jay Poskanzer’s desk and tested out the solution he’d finally come up with.
Poskanzer toyed with a miniature baseball bat, a Red Sox souvenir. He leaned back in his expensive-looking office chair. “What do you mean, you want out?”
“I want to stop cooperating with them.”
Poskanzer’s eyes narrowed. His wire-framed glasses were clouded, as if begrimed by fingerprints. His frizzy reddish-gray curls came to a point on either temple like ram’s horns. “You signed an agreement. It’s a binding legal document.”
“Yeah, well, I want to get out of it. I want it nullified. I want to stop cooperating with the DEA. Simple as that.”
The sun shone through one of the plate-glass walls of his office, flooding the place with light, glinting off the glass-topped desk. “Dude. Not so simple.”
“If it were simple, I wouldn’t need to hire you.”
“Are we on the clock?”
“I’ll let you know in a couple of minutes.”
Poskanzer shrugged. “On what grounds do you want to get out of the agreement?”
“Professional misconduct.”
He chuckled nervously. “What does that mean?”
“Threatening to leak to the Sinaloa cartel that I’m cooperating with them.”
“They wouldn’t-You don’t actually believe they’d do that, do you?”
He nodded. “Sure. It wouldn’t surprise me. I take them at their word.”
Of course, all they had to do was take a deposition and put him on the witness stand and the cartel would put out a hit on him. It was a wholly unnecessary threat. But they’d made it.
“You got proof? An e-mail, maybe?”
He shook his head.
“Voice mail? A note? Anything?”
He shook his head some more.
“What are their names, again?”
Danny told him. Poskanzer wrote them down. “So it’s your word against two federal agents’.”
“Not if we get them on tape.”
“Wait a second.” Poskanzer held up his hand like a traffic cop. “You’re not talking about recording it yourself, I hope.”
“Why not?”
“It’s illegal, for one thing? In Massachusetts, both parties have to consent.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t think they’re going to consent.”
“Right. And I can’t counsel you to break the law. That’s against the Massachusetts lawyers’ code.”
“Well, I didn’t ask your counsel on that, did I?” he said with a smile. “We’re talking about a massive, multibillion-dollar investigation into the Sinaloa cartel. So I broke the law by making an illegal recording. That’ll be a slap on the hand. A goddamned speeding ticket.”