“For how much?” Jack said.
Ian stared at him. “For how much?”
“Yes. What pay rate, Ian?”
“You expect me to pay you to kill a witness you left alive? Pay you to clean up your own damned mess?”
“The mess,” Jack said, still looking at the floor, “occurred while we were already in your employ. This mess is part of a previously existing mess. One that you paid us to clean up. For you.”
“I expected it done better.”
Jack glanced to his right, at Patrick, who was some ten feet away. He had drifted farther from his brother by a few steps.
“We’ve disappointed him, Patrick.”
“It seems that way.”
Jack turned to face Ian. Now both brothers were staring at him, two sets of those glacial gazes. Ian suddenly wished he hadn’t closed the door.
“The new mess is part of the old one, Detective O’Neil,” Jack said. “You own one, you own the other. Can you follow that? Consider us…” He waved a hand between himself and his brother. “There was one payment. There were two Blackwells. You got the one, you got the other. Are you with me here? Do you see the correlation?”
“I’ve got no money for you,” Ian said. His mouth was dry, and his hand was all the way over the pistol grip now. Neither of them had so much as blinked at that. He knew that they had seen it, and he wanted them to care. Why didn’t they care?
“If there’s no money in it,” Jack said, “then why on earth would we kill this boy?”
“You’re serious?”
Jack gave a patient nod.
“Because he can put you in fucking prison. Both of you. Get one, get the other, you tell me? Well, bud, he’s going to get you both. Get all of us. Me? At least I got a chance. But you two? He saw you two.”
“Your thesis, then, would be as follows: We kill for money, or we kill to protect ourselves. There are those who pay, and those who threaten. Correct?”
“Correct,” Ian said.
Jack looked at him for a long time and didn’t say anything. It was Patrick who finally broke the silence by saying, “And you, Ian, are no longer one who pays.”
The problem was that there were two of them. You tried to watch them both but they never stood together. There was always the distance. So one spoke and you looked at him and the other you could see only out of the corner of your eye. Then that one spoke and you’d look at him and now the other could be seen only out of the corner of your eye. Ian had been speaking with Jack, had been focused on Jack, had been looking at Jack with his hand on his gun, ready to pull it and fire. Then Patrick spoke, and Ian did what instinct told you to do-he looked in that direction.
He was facing the wrong way when the rush of motion came from Jack then, and by the time he spun back and drew the Glock, there was already a suppressed pistol in Jack Blackwell’s hand and it bucked twice and Ian was down on his knees in his living room with blood spilling rich and red onto the hardwood floors. He wasn’t going to die like that, without even getting a shot off, but now he was looking at Jack and there was Patrick on the other side, Ian saw him out of the corner of his eye, and when the shots came from that direction, Ian was facing the wrong way yet again.
You got one, you got the other.
Detective Sergeant Ian O’Neil was dead on his living-room floor when the Blackwell brothers left his house, making sure to lock the door behind them, and returned to their truck.
“He made some sense,” Patrick said as he slid behind the wheel. “That bit about reasons for killing? Money or threat? He was a convincing man.”
“He had his moments,” Jack said, putting the pistol into the center console and leaving the lid up until Patrick added his.
“All the same,” Patrick said, “I’d like to have been paid to find the boy.”
“Young Jace offers us no reward, that’s true. The risk, though…”
“Yes,” Patrick said, gunning the big V-8 to life. “The risk is substantial. And so I suppose we’ll have to find him.”
“I suppose we will.”
5
Don’t try to guess.
That had been Allison’s rule for the day. She had seen all of their files, she knew the boys by heart in some ways, and she hadn’t even met them yet.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said aloud when she fed the horse, Tango, her baby, a rehab horse. He’d been kicked and sustained a fracture that went almost the full length of his leg. The bone was broken but not shattered. If it had been, he would have had to be put down. Instead, there was hope, though he’d never be able to perform at the level he once had. He was now on the third month of his rehab-which meant that he hadn’t lain down in three months. Tango had been standing up for ninety-four consecutive days. He wore a bit connected to two tension bands that kept him from lying down. If he did get down, the chances that he’d destroy the leg were high, because he’d have to put a huge amount of force on the foreleg in order to push himself up again.
And so he remained standing. He betrayed no trace of pain or frustration or fatigue. Allison had been around horses her entire life, and she knew they didn’t have to lie down for sleep or to rest in the way that humans and many other animals did, but still it astounded her to see him there, day after day, so patient, so steadfast. So trusting.
She spoke to him while she groomed him, and he gave a series of low snorts and, in trademark Tango fashion, shot a streamer of snot onto her arm. This was a compliment. This was true affection.
“Two more weeks, big guy,” she said. That was all he had left wearing the bit. The foreleg should be fully healed by now, he’d taken walks and shown no trace of pain, but he hadn’t held a rider. She couldn’t wait to return to this horse. It was something to look forward to in a summer of unease.
Once she’d ridden horses for show. Fairs, competitions, bizarre Montana beauty pageants. Her mother had loved that world. Allison, not so much. The horse was always an afterthought to her mother-Allison’s wardrobe, her hair, her stance: that mattered most. After a while, you began to wonder which creature was really being trotted out for show.
She was still talking to the horse when the van pulled in, and there they were: six boys of the sort she’d met every summer and one who was on the run from a killer. They unloaded in front of the bunkhouse, a simple cabin with no electricity or running water. Allison was already scrutinizing them during introductions, couldn’t help it, don’t try to guess a laughable command now.
There was Drew, sixteen, from Vermont. Tall and sullen and wanting to be someplace else. Raymond, fifteen, from Houston. Dark eyes that darted around as if he were taking an inventory of all possible threats. Connor, fourteen, from Ohio, who stared at Allison’s breasts instead of her eyes when he was introduced and then blushed when he realized he’d been caught. Ty, fourteen, from Indiana, a smaller kid but knotted with muscle and puffed up to show it as much as possible. Jeff, fifteen, from Kansas, who stood behind the others and didn’t make eye contact with anyone when he introduced himself. Marco, fifteen, from Las Cruces, already stepping into the role of class clown, making a series of soft jokes about the “compound” that earned smiles from Bryce, fifteen, of Chicago, but they were nervous smiles.
Already she was handicapping them. Bryce looked uneasy and was trying hard to find a friend. Possible. Jeff and Drew both looked like they wanted to be on the first flight out, but Drew’s expression carried more attitude problems. Jeff just looked scared.
Probably Jeff, she thought, and then she realized Ethan was watching her and she smiled at him and turned away, chastising herself.
It doesn’t matter.