Lucky(48)

“In my… condition?”

“Don’t try to hide it. I know about the baby.”

Lucky felt sick. Priscilla had had them followed, but more than that, she must have had the private investigator go through their garbage, maybe even tap their phones. Lucky struggled to smile, as if the idea of this baby were still the one bright spot in her life. But all she could picture was some stranger pulling a positive pregnancy test out of her garbage bin and bringing it to Priscilla.

“You’ve been pregnant for… almost three months now? You should be starting to show soon.”

Lucky let her hands creep down to her flat abdomen, pushed her stomach out slightly. It was painful to pretend the baby was still there, painful to even think about the little dream, the big idea, a golden ticket floating in a sea inside her. But she knew she had to. If Priscilla believed she was still pregnant with Cary’s child, Lucky had something she wanted. And that was a powerful thing. Priscilla was a con artist and a criminal, but she couldn’t kill her own grandchild. There is nothing I don’t know about you and my son, Priscilla had said. You could have someone followed by a private investigator and see most things—but not what was going on under the surface. The heartaches and losses that happened when you were alone would never be public knowledge. Blood on a bathroom floor was not something a detective sitting outside your house could easily uncover.

“This must be tough,” Priscilla was saying, her voice now dripping with fake empathy. “You have no idea where my son is, and you’re on the run, pregnant. Your future is very uncertain.”

Lucky pressed her lips together and nodded.

Priscilla reached forward and poured water from a carafe on the coffee table in front of them. “Here. Drink this. You should stay hydrated.” Lucky accepted the water but didn’t drink.

“To answer your earlier question, he brought me the dog last month. Because I asked him to.” She poured herself some water and took a sip. “There, you see? It’s not poisoned. You can have some of yours now.” She laughed. “Oh, Lucky. The expression on your face. Anyway, the dog was collateral.”

“Collateral for?”

“The money he was laundering for me through his restaurant. Oh, come on, you really had no idea?” She laughed again. “You really thought Cary’s big dream was to be a restaurateur? He told me you didn’t know—but I think until this moment I didn’t believe it. It makes sense, though, that you weren’t aware of what he was really doing. Because if you did know, you wouldn’t be here.”

“Why not?”

Priscilla leaned toward Lucky. “The people I work for, the people Cary was in turn working for, are ruthless.” Lucky looked closely at her. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought Priscilla seemed afraid now. Then her expression cleared and she was cool and confident again. “If you had any idea about that, I’m sure you would have kept yourself hidden. I know you think I’m the height of evil, but I’m not. You can trust me to tell you when you are in danger. And you are. I’m probably the only person in the world you can trust right now—”

“I will never trust you.”

“—and the heartbreaking truth is that Cary is probably dead, okay? They probably beat him and left him for dead in the desert, those terrible, terrible people.” Her hand fluttered up to her chest, and she blinked, hard and fast. Were those real tears there? Crocodile tears? Lucky tried to process what Priscilla had just said, but it didn’t feel real at all. Cary, beaten and dead? Tears gathered behind her eyes, too, but she refused to let them fall in front of Priscilla.

“Are you sure?” she whispered.

“I tried to protect him. It’s why I asked him for the dog. When I discovered you were pregnant, I was afraid he was going to do something stupid. Like try to run away with you, start a family somewhere he thought I couldn’t find him. I told him to do one last job for me, and that I’d come and take the dog as collateral. He loved Betty. And so did you. Stupidly, I thought it would be enough to keep you two in one place, for a while at least. But he simply took the money he was cleaning for my associates and—well, I’m not sure, exactly. He hid it somewhere, with all the rest of the money you were stealing in your Ponzi scheme. Tell me, where were you two planning to go, exactly?”

“Grenada,” Lucky lied, blinking the last of her unshed tears over Cary away. Her heart was starting to pound and her fingers were starting to tingle. She needed to get out of there. But how?

“I see. And that’s why you had purchased plane tickets to Dominica?” Her voice was steely now. She was leaning so close Lucky could see the blood vessels in her eyes, smell her breath. “Stop lying to me. It’s over. You can’t hide anything from me now. We’re talking about a lot of money. And I need to find it. Or else. Do you know where it is?”

“I swear to you, I don’t.”

“Millions of dollars. And he never mentioned it?”

“Never.”

“If that money doesn’t surface soon, someone else is going to die. And in your case”—she glanced down at Lucky’s stomach—“two people will die. I care about this child, but I’m not going to sacrifice myself for it. I don’t want anything more than to survive. If you’re to survive as well, we need to work together to find the money Cary was hiding. And we need to be completely honest with each other about everything we know.” This was so familiar; she could almost hear Cary’s voice saying the same thing: We can lie to other people, but never to each other.