“Yeah, chill out,” Frank said. He turned to Vince and glowered. “And you!”
“What?” Vince didn’t even look at him; he was trying to get Tracy to move further into the room, perhaps to sit her ass down.
“You just don’t fucking get it, do you? After all we talked about, after all the shit we’ve been through.”
“Cut the crap, Frank,” Tracy said, breaking away from Vince. “What about the shit I’ve been through. I was almost killed too! What about me?”
Vince looked at Frank. “What about her, Frank? Don’t you think she deserves to know what’s going on?”
“No,” Frank said, moving into the room. Mike was still conked out in dreamland. He crossed the room and peered out the window into the night beyond. “This has nothing to do with her. I don’t know why you had to make it her business.”
“Because she’s my girlfriend and I love her,” Vince said. The tone in Vince’s voice made Frank turn around. Vince was standing with Tracy near the dresser. His arm was around her waist. Tracy had her hands on Vince’s hips, their bodies facing each other, faces turned to Frank. “They almost killed her that day at the airport. She’s known everything about what’s been going on since the day my mother died. She knew that my mother’s murder has something to do with all this. She was worried about me. When we left for Pennsylvania I wanted to call her; she knew I was planning to go back anyway. I called her from the hotel room the night you and Mike went back to Lititz.”
“Shit,” Frank muttered. All the trust he’d felt for Vince, all the camaraderie, was crumbling away.
“I didn’t do this to cause any trouble,” Vince continued, his voice steady. “She already knew something was going on even before you showed up. What else was I supposed to do?”
“Lie to her the way Mike lied to his wife,” Frank muttered. He couldn’t look at Vince.
Vince was silent. He looked at Mike, who lay in bed conked out. Frank felt the weight of the world crashing on his shoulders. Suddenly the idea of lying to the one you loved the most didn’t seem like such a hot idea. Look where it had gotten Mike and Carol.
With that came the thought of Brandy and the kids. They didn’t know anything. Oh, Brandy suspected, but he’d purposely kept her in the dark. Had that been the right choice? Would not knowing what to expect make her as vulnerable to the Children as it had made Carol?
Shuddering, Frank reached for the chair behind him and sank into it. He felt so tired and angry and frustrated. He wanted to scream, he wanted to smash something. And for the first time in years he wanted a drink.
“Frank,” Vince said. He approached warily. “What’s going on? You said something was wrong…”
“It’s Mike,” Frank said, not even looking at Vince. Part of him was still fighting the urge to throw Vince and Tracy out of the room, but another part simply told him to let it go. So what if she knows? What the hell is she going to do?
“What’s wrong with him?”
Frank told him what happened. He spoke slowly, at first not looking at Vince as he began the story. But as he told it Vince sat down on another chair and Tracy sat on the desk next to Vince. They held hands, listening calmly and patiently as Frank told them about getting Mike’s frantic call, his arrival at the house, and Mike’s panicked state. He told them about the condition the house was in, the blood on the floor in the bathroom, the signs of a struggle. He told them about their search for the second key to the safe deposit box, about Mike’s frantic grief. “I brought him back here and put Valium in his drink so he would chill out,” he concluded. “And then I called you.” He’d straightened his posture around the middle of the narrative, but now that he concluded it he slouched down a little bit. “I didn’t think we should be alone tonight. Plus, I thought maybe we should go to Mike’s friend Billy with what we have now. We have enough documentation to take to him. It’s all circumstantial, but…” He shrugged. “I’m hoping it’ll be enough.”
Tracy looked concerned; Vince looked alarmed. “This is getting too big.” He looked at Tracy, his eyes wide. “The more this goes on the scarier this shit is getting. It’s like everywhere we turn something else is just hitting us.”
“Okay, let’s put some of this in perspective,” Tracy said. Whatever anger she had had upon entering the room seemed mostly gone as her tone of voice became serious. She still ignored Frank as she spoke mostly to Vince, but Frank could tell she was including him in her observations as well. “You haven’t called the police yet, which is a good thing. I’ve got a feeling that if you did they might have put two-and-two together and hauled you in for the shooting back in PA. Two, there is the shooting investigation to still think about. Have either of you been watching the news since you got back?”
Frank shook his head. “Not much. I scanned CNN a few hours ago and went online to see if there’s anything new and there’s nothing.”
“Okay, so I guess we have to assume they’re still looking for you.” Tracy turned to Vince.
“What about Mike?” Vince asked.
“My first concern was getting him out of his house,” Frank said. “Far as I knew, they could have been waiting for us in there. It looked like whoever hit the place did it a few days ago. The house was locked up and had that stuffiness a house gets when it’s been closed up for awhile.”
Tracy nodded. As much as Frank didn’t want to admit it, she was very much a part of the equation now. “So you think they broke in when his wife was home? You think they kidnapped her or something?”
Frank shrugged. “Something happened. There was blood all over the bathroom and the master bedroom.”
“No sign of forced entry, right?” Vince asked.
“No.” Frank frowned. “Mike said he let himself in, just like always. The minute he walked in he saw the place was trashed.”
“I wonder if she let them in,” Tracy mused. She leaned against the desk. “You know, maybe they knocked on the door and she answered it and they forced their way in. They chased her upstairs and got her in the bathroom.”
“It’s possible.”
“You’re sure they took the key to that safe deposit box?” Vince asked Frank.
“Yeah.” Frank nodded, glancing at Mike. “We looked all over for it. Mike’s pretty sure they took it.”
“So they knew he was working on this, that he’s been keeping information on the investigation,” Vince continued. “That means they know about us.”
“That’s why I thought we should be together tonight,” Frank said. “You know, safety in numbers.”
“What do we do with him in the meantime?” Tracy motioned to Mike.
“Fuck if I know. I know the first thing we should do is go to his bank tomorrow and see if we can get to that safe deposit box. He has another key. Besides, I think he wigged out a little too hard about that thing. If his signature was the only one on file, nobody else can access it, even his wife. The bank would need some kind of death certificate or something for them to allow anybody else access to it.”
Vince nodded. “That’s true.” He looked down at Mike’s sleeping figure. “How long you think he’ll be out.”
“Till tomorrow morning.”
“So there’s nothing to do ’till then,” Vince said.
“Nope.”
“And we’re not going to the police,” Tracy said, addressing the statement to Vince and Frank.
Vince glanced at Frank, who shrugged. “No. I don’t think we should. Not yet. Going to the cops is going to cause a bunch of shit.”