Run Away(19)

Someone did. And as he did, Hester’s face lost color. She didn’t say a word. Not for a very long time. When she finally spoke again, her voice was uncharacteristically soft. “Email me the report.”

She hung up.

“What?” Simon asked.

“They don’t think you did it. Correction: They can’t think you did it.”





Chapter

Seven



Ash watched the target pull up to the dilapidated three-family home.

“Is he driving a Cadillac?” Dee Dee asked him.

“Looks like it.”

“Is it an Eldorado?”

Dee Dee never stopped talking.

“No.”

“You sure?”

“It’s an ATS. Cadillac stopped making the Eldorado in 2002.”

“How do you know that?”

Ash shrugged. He just knew stuff.

“My daddy had an Eldorado,” Dee Dee said.

Ash frowned. “Your ‘daddy’?”

“What, you think I don’t remember him?”

Dee Dee had been in foster homes from the age of six. Ash had entered his first when he was four. Over the next fourteen years he had been in over twenty. Dee had probably been in about the same. On three occasions, for a total of eight months, they had ended up in the same foster home.

“He bought it used, of course. Like, really used. The bottom was rusted out. But Daddy loved that car. He let me sit in the front seat with him. No seat belt. The leather in the seats? It was all cracked. It’d scrape my legs. Anyway, he’d play the radio loud and sometimes he’d sing along. That’s what I remember best. He had a good voice, my old man. He’d smile and start singing and then he’d sort of let go of the wheel and steer with his wrists, you know what I mean?”

Ash knew. He also knew Daddy steered with one hand while jamming his other between his young daughter’s legs, but now didn’t seem to be the time to bring that up.

“Daddy loved that damned car,” Dee Dee said with a pout. “Until…

Ash couldn’t help himself. “Until what?”

“Maybe that’s where it all went wrong. When Daddy found out the truth about that car.”

Ash cringed every time she used the word “Daddy.”

The target got out of the car. He was a burly guy in jeans, scuffed Timberland-knockoff boots, and a flannel shirt. He sported a beard and a camouflage-colored Boston Red Sox baseball cap too small for his pumpkin head.

Ash gestured with his chin. “That our guy?”

“Looks like it. What’s the plan?”

The target opened the car’s back door, and two young girls wearing bright-green school backpacks got out. His daughters, Ash knew. The taller, Kelsey, was ten. The younger, Kiera, was eight.

“We wait.”

Ash sat in the driver’s seat. Dee Dee was in the passenger’s. Ash hadn’t seen her in three years. He’d figured that she was dead until their recent reunion. He’d expected it to be awkward—too much time, too many bridges—but they quickly fell into their old patterns.

“So what happened?” Ash asked.

“What?”

“With your dad’s Eldorado. Where did it all go wrong? What was this truth he learned?”

The smile dropped off her face. Dee Dee shifted in her seat.

“You don’t have to tell me.”

“No,” she said. “I want to.”

They both stared out the front window at the target’s home. Ash put his hand on his hip, where his gun was holstered. He had his instructions. He couldn’t imagine what the burly guy had done—what any on the list had done—but sometimes the less you knew, the better.

“We went out to this fancy fish restaurant for dinner,” Dee Dee began. “This was right before my grandma died. So she paid. My dad, well, he was a steak guy. Always. He hated fish. I mean, really hated it.”

Ash had no idea where this was going.

“So the waiter comes over and starts reading off the daily specials. He has this blackboard with him and the specials, they’re all written out in chalk. Fancy, right?”

“Right.”

“So anyway, the waiter gets to the fish special and he has this weird accent and anyway, he says, ‘The chef strongly recommends the’—then this waiter, he waves at the board like it’s a car on The Price Is Right—‘Grilled Dorado with walnuts and parsley pesto.’”

Ash turned to look at her. You’d think the years wouldn’t have been kind to Dee Dee, all she’d been through, but she looked more beautiful than ever. Her golden-blonde hair was tied in a thick braid running down her back. Her lips were full, her skin flawless. Her green eyes were a bright emerald shade most assumed involved contact lenses or some kind of cosmetics.

“So Daddy asks the waiter to repeat that, the name of the fish, and the waiter does and Daddy—”

Man, Ash wished she’d stop calling him that.

“—and Daddy starts fuming. I mean, he just runs out of the restaurant. Knocks over his chair and everything. See, his car, his supercool car—it’s named for a fish! Daddy can’t handle that, you know?”

Ash just looked at her. “You’re serious?”