Hadley & Grace(41)

The car rolls to a stop. Beside them is a trailer that serves as the ranger station for the archaeological site. Across from it is a hole the size of a basketball court and deep as a two-story building.

Before Grace can open her door, Hadley blurts out, “We can’t just leave him here. They don’t open again until Tuesday. There’s no food or water.”

“We’re not going to just leave him,” Grace says, and Hadley sighs in relief. “You’re going to stay with him.”





31





MARK


The trailer is oblong, with a door on the short side and two high windows on each of the long sides. It is warm and musty and full of artifacts—maps and photos, rocks and fossils, spearheads and ancient tools, and a yellow human skull, the bottom jaw missing.

Mark sits on the floor, hard gray carpet with a blackened path worn around the displays. A hall opposite the door leads to a restroom, mechanical space, and storage room. His pants are tied by the back belt loops to the ranger’s desk through the hole for the computer cables by the ACE bandage that was on Torelli’s ankle. And his hands are still bound by his tie but are now in front of him.

Herrick and Torelli fought about where to tie his hands, Torelli arguing it was horribly uncomfortable to sit with your hands behind your back, and Herrick spitting back that she didn’t care, that they weren’t running a spa, and the reason you tie the hands behind the back is because it makes it more difficult to escape.

Herrick was right, but thankfully, Torelli won. She threatened that, if Herrick tied Mark’s hands behind his back, she would release him the moment Herrick left.

The women glared at each other for a full minute before Herrick finally backed down. “Fine,” she said, “but I’m taking the guns.” Then she muttered, “Not that I’d mind terribly if he broke free and shot you.”

They are an odd pair, the two of them, and Mark wonders again how they partnered up. Like twins separated at birth, then reunited, they are like squabbling siblings with nothing in common except a fierce loyalty to each other.

Herrick is scrappy and cunning like an alley cat—wily and defensive with guile and toughness that speak to her rough history. Torelli is the opposite. The woman belongs in the society pages of a magazine, not sitting in a trailer in the middle of the desert hiding from the law.

“Hadley,” he says.

She looks up from where she sits at the desk, her leg propped on top of it, her ankle blue and swollen.

“Please, you need to listen to me.”

Her face drops to look at her hands in her lap as her head shakes, her black hair swaying with it.

Not wanting to make her cry again, he softens his tone. “This is all a misunderstanding.”

Her head switches direction, nodding with his words.

“You’re not a criminal.”

It returns to swaying, and though she’s nearly forty, she looks like a little girl who’s been caught doing something she wasn’t supposed to, and he finds himself feeling bad for her. She so obviously doesn’t belong in this situation. She is a good person whose only real crime was making some bad choices, the worst being marrying Frank Torelli, a two-bit crook.

“Which is why you need to turn yourself in,” he says. “Before this gets any worse.”

A tear falls from her chin and lands on her lap, and his heart twists as he realizes he’s failed. He has a debilitating weakness when it comes to women and children crying. Tears destroy him.

He tries to block it out and soldiers on. “At this point, there’s still a case to be made that you didn’t know I was an agent. You could’ve thought I was working for your husband.”

Her face snaps up, her expression slick with tears and guilt, the confession that she knew perfectly well who he was written all over it.

He looks away, unable to take her sad green eyes.

After a long minute, she mumbles, “What did he do? Frank?”

“You don’t know?”

“I thought he just ran a parking business,” she says.

She either is a very good liar or genuinely has no idea what Frank was into. He believes it is the second. He sighs, irritated and angry, frustrated that women so easily put their trust in men, and angry that men like Frank Torelli take advantage of that trust. When Shelly gets older, he is going to set her straight on how a marriage should work—two people who take care of each other and respect each other. He and Marcia might not have had much passion, but they damn well respected each other. He’s surprised when he feels a twinge of appreciation for his ex-wife. It’s been a long time since he’s felt anything but hurt and rage.

“Frank was laundering money,” he says. “Along with running an illegal gambling operation and dealing in some small-time trafficking.”

“Drugs?” she says.

“Cocaine. Ecstasy.”

Her eyes drop again, and her arms fold across her stomach like she has a stomachache.

“The money you took was evidence,” he says. “So we were trying to get it back.”

A long beat passes as she considers this; then she says, “So, at the hospital, you weren’t trying to arrest me?”

“Nope. Just trying to stop you from destroying our case.”

“So, if I’d have just talked to you and given you the money, that would’ve been it? You would’ve arrested Frank, and I would’ve been free to go?”