No One Will Miss Her(25)
“But,” she’d protested, which was when Rick leaned in and placed a hand on her knee. The touch was more fatherly than lecherous, but still startled her into silence.
“Adrienne, this money is yours,” he’d said. “I want to be absolutely clear on that. You are in control, and I can distribute these funds any way you like.” He grinned at her, that vulpine smile. Cunning and hungry. “But it’s very important to me that you and your assets are well taken care of, and I believe I have a solution that can satisfy both your immediate and long-term concerns, without doing anything rash. This way, your interests are protected on all fronts . . . including from the greedy hands of the IRS.”
She’d capitulated then. She couldn’t very well explain that her immediate concerns were far more immediate and far less nebulous than she’d led him to believe, that the IRS was the least of her worries. That two people were dead and she was living on borrowed time.
She grimaced as she walked, hurrying to keep pace with the fast-moving crowd, office drones rushing to catch their trains home. Nobody looked at her, but she still felt horribly conspicuous, exposed. She had walked out with a check after all, albeit for just a fraction of what was in the accounts she’d hoped to liquidate entirely. But a fraction was a lot of money. More than she’d ever held at once. Rick was right: Ethan had planned for every imaginable scenario, including but not limited to his incarceration or death, to ensure that his wife was well taken care of. Whatever happened to him, Adrienne could be assured of living on in the manner to which she was accustomed, as the saying went. Or at least close enough.
“I don’t want to pry,” Rick had said, while the grin stayed in place, suggesting there was nothing he wanted to do more. “But perhaps we ought to review and discuss the potential division of assets? You’d be entitled to far more than this if, just for instance, you were anticipating a divorce—”
“Oh no, no. It’s nothing like that,” she’d said, quickly and with a laugh, as though the idea of divorce was shockingly ridiculous.
Oh no, Rick, she imagined herself saying. It’s something so much worse. Tell me, Rick: have you ever seen what happens when a shell full of Mag-Shok turkey shot connects with a human jaw? Her face literally exploded, Rick.
And were her immediate concerns satisfied, as her trusted advisor had so elegantly put it? Thanks to Ethan’s thorough planning, the answer might actually be yes. Adrienne had known about some of it—like the safe-deposit box, freshly emptied, its contents now safely packed into the bag on her shoulder. It had been a struggle not to gasp when she opened it, but she’d taken everything. Who knew when she’d have another chance? Better to collect it all, even if it meant walking around with hundreds of thousands of dollars stuffed into the zip pocket inside her gym tote.
The cashier’s check, plus the diamonds. Now, those had been a surprise. Lord knew when Ethan had decided to acquire them, or how much they might be worth, but they were marvelously easy to transport.
She would have to wait to count it all. To calculate, estimate, decide whether what she already had was enough—which meant she’d have to decide exactly how much she needed, a question that only brought a dozen more in its wake. Enough for what? Enough for who?
Enough for two? she thought, and gripped the bag tighter still. To know what was “enough” required knowing what came next, and she didn’t. She’d been half-convinced that it would all fall apart before she could make it even this far.
Instead, it was all going better than she’d dared to hope, even with the setbacks. Her greatest fear was that Richard Politano would stand in the way of her getting what she needed; instead, he’d been all too eager to help. Of course he didn’t believe her about the divorce. He’d probably started stewing on that little possibility well before she arrived, calculating that Adrienne’s side would be the more lucrative if she and Ethan split up. But there was something else, too: a palpable sense, running throughout their conversation, that Rick had never really liked Ethan. That he not only enjoyed helping Adrienne, but also got a little kick out of doing it by moving money around behind her husband’s back. All the available funds were now in her name, spread through a series of brand-new accounts that Rick had promised she’d be able to access within forty-eight hours.
She wondered if she could wait that long. Or if she should. What if the additional money made the difference between getting away and getting caught? How much did a person need to make herself disappear? To become someone else and get the hell out of town, maybe even out of the country, a long drive south and across the border into Mexico—except that neither she nor her husband spoke Spanish. These were the things she needed to think about, should have already been thinking about. But even as she tried to focus, to plan ahead, her mind kept insistently circling back, revisiting everything she’d said and done so far that day. The commuting crowd on the sidewalk swept her along, and she drifted with it, holding the bag close but allowing her thoughts to wander. She picked through her memories, mulling over her missteps, realizing she was more worried about what she didn’t remember. How many mistakes had she made without knowing they were mistakes? It occurred to her, suddenly, how many security cameras would have picked her up as she journeyed from place to place today. Sitting in the waiting room at Rick’s office, crossing through the lobby at the bank. She had been smart enough to avoid toll roads on the drive back last night, to obey all traffic laws on the endless red-light-green-light slog down the nearly empty Post Road. But the city, with its noise and its bustle, had lulled her. As though she’d already begun to disappear, just another face in the crowd.